AI 2041

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How will AI change our world within twenty years? A pioneering technologist and acclaimed writer team up for a “dazzling” (The New York Times) look at the future that “brims with intriguing insights” (Financial Times). This edition includes a new foreword by Kai-Fu Lee.
 
Named a best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal • The Washington Post • Financial Times
 
Long before the advent of ChatGPT, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan understood the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to transform our daily lives. But even as the world wakes up to the power of AI, many of us still fail to grasp the big picture. Chatbots and large language models are only the beginning.
 
In this “inspired collaboration” (The Wall Street Journal), Lee and Chen join forces to imagine our world in 2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping, globe-spanning short stories and accompanying commentary, their book introduces readers to an array of eye-opening settings and characters grappling with the new abundance and potential harms of AI technologies like deep learning, mixed reality, robotics, artificial general intelligence, and autonomous weapons.“An invaluable and entertaining vision of the future.”—Ray Dalio, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Principles

“To say that AI 2041 is enlightening and valuable, is to understate its significance. . . . AI 2041’s scientific fiction gives us a way to open our eyes to what is actually going on all around us and where things are heading.”—John Kao, Forbes

“By blending imaginative storytelling and technical expertise, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan bring to life a vision for AI that addresses both our curiosity and our fears. Read this captivating book to better understand how and when certain technologies are likely to mature, and what that could mean for all of us.”—Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

“We have reached a momentous inflection point with AI, and no other book I’ve read captures it with such stunning insight and imagination. Instead of wondering whether to trust AI, we must think of it as a tool—one that we humans are in charge of shaping. Kai-Fu Lee’s brilliant analysis in AI 2041 embodies this urgent mandate for humanity, while Chen Qiufan’s gripping stories reveal how AI can become a bridge between previously unsolvable problems and a future of new possibilities.”—Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO, Thrive Global

“AI 2041 is the perfect fusion of science and fiction, illuminating the pervasive impact artificial intelligence will have in our lives and the challenges we face in shaping a techno-future that benefits all of humanity.”—Marc Benioff, chair and CEO, Salesforce

“Applying AI to business usually means learning the technology first and then figuring out how to apply it. AI 2041 allows readers to take the exact opposite approach. Through amazingly entertaining stories, Lee and Chen take us on an immersive trip through the future and then zoom out with exceptionally clear explanations of the technology at work. The result is an enjoyable and eye-opening book for those trying to understand how to apply AI.”—Mark Cuban

“Making predictions about the future of AI is not for the faint of heart. This inspired collaboration between a pioneering technologist and a visionary writer of science fiction offers bold and urgent insights into how these technologies may impact our lives.”—Yann LeCun, winner of the Turing Award; chief AI scientist, Facebook

“Are we fit for the strange new world we seem determined to create? What is clear is that imagination-defying change is upon us. Less clear is what these changes will mean for humankind. Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan’s AI 2041 offers the most carefully and caringly considered visions of what is soon to come.”—Bennett Miller, Academy Award–nominated director of Moneyball and FoxcatcherKai-Fu Lee is the CEO of Sinovation Ventures and New York Times bestselling author of AI Superpowers. Lee was formerly the president of Google China and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence Council at the World Economic Forum, he has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Lee’s numerous honors include being named to the Time 100 and Wired 25 Icons lists. He is based in Beijing.

Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chan) is an award-winning author, translator, creative producer, and curator. He is the president of the World Chinese Science Fiction Association. His works include Waste Tide, Future Disease, and The Algorithms for Life. The founder of Thema Mundi, a content development studio, he lives in Beijing and Shanghai.I believe it’s indisputable that computers simply “think” differently from our brains. The best way to increase computer intelligence is to develop general computational methods (like deep learning and GPT-3) that scale with more processing power and more data. In the past few years, we’ve seen the best NLP models ingest ten times more data each year, and with each factor of ten, we saw qualitative improvements. In January 2021, just seven months after the release of GPT-3, Google announced a language model with 1.75 trillion parameters, which is nine times larger than GPT-3. This continued the trend of language model prowess growing by about ten times per year. This language model has already read more than any one of us could in millions of lifetimes. This progress will only grow exponentially.

While GPT-3 makes many basic mistakes, we are seeing glimmers of intelligence, and it is, after all, only version 3. Perhaps in twenty years, GPT-23 will read every word ever written and watch every video ever produced and build its own model of the world. This all-knowing sequence transducer would contain all the accumulated knowledge of human history. All you’ll have to do is ask it the right questions.

So, will deep learning eventually become “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), matching human intelligence in every way? Will we encounter “singularity” (see chapter 10)? I don’t believe it will happen by 2041. There are many challenges that we have not made much progress on or even understood, such as how to model creativity, strategic thinking, reasoning, counter-factual thinking, emotions, and consciousness. These challenges are likely to require a dozen more breakthroughs like deep learning, but we’ve had only one great breakthrough in over sixty years, so I believe we are unlikely to see a dozen in twenty years.

In addition, I would suggest that we stop using AGI as the ultimate test of AI. As I described in chapter 1, AI’s mind is different from the human mind. In twenty years, deep learning and its extensions will beat humans on an ever-increasing number of tasks, but there will still be many existing tasks that humans can handle much better than deep learning. There will even be some new tasks that showcase human superiority, especially if AI’s progress inspires us to improve and evolve.

What’s important is that we develop useful applications suitable for AI and seek to find human-AI symbiosis, rather than obsess about whether or when deep-learning AI will become AGI. I consider the obsession with AGI to be a narcissistic human tendency to view ourselves as the gold standard.US

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