AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

Length: 480 pages
Edition: 1
Language: English
Publisher: Currency
Publication Date: 2021-09-14
ISBN-10: 059323829X
ISBN-13: 9780593238295
Sales Rank: #1541 (See Top 100 Books)

How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years?

“This inspired collaboration between a pioneering technologist and a visionary writer of science fiction offers bold and urgent insights.”—Yann LeCun, winner of the Turing Award; chief AI scientist, Facebook

“Amazingly entertaining . . . Lee and Chen take us on an immersive trip through the future. . . . Eye-opening.”—Mark Cuban

AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand-new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work, however, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order. Meanwhile, AI will bring new risks in the form of autonomous weapons and smart technology that inherits human bias. AI is at a tipping point, and people need to wake up—both to AI’s radiant pathways and its existential perils for life as we know it.

In this provocative, utterly original work, Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China and bestselling author of AI Superpowers, teams up with celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan to imagine our world in 2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping short stories, they introduce readers to an array of eye-opening 2041 settings, such as:

In San Francisco, the “job reallocation” industry emerges as deep learning AI causes widespread job displacement
In Tokyo, a music fan is swept up in an immersive form of celebrity worship based on virtual reality and mixed reality
In Mumbai, a teenage girl rebels when AI’s crunching of big data gets in the way of romance
In Seoul, virtual companions with perfected natural language processing (NLP) skills offer orphaned twins new ways to connect
In Munich, a rogue scientist draws on quantum computing, computer vision and other AI technologies in a revenge plot that imperils the world

By gazing toward a not-so-distant horizon, AI 2041 offers urgent insights into our collective future—while reminding readers that, ultimately, humankind remains the author of its destiny.

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Epigraph
Introduction by Kai-Fu Lee: The Real Story of AI
Introduction by Chen Qiufan: How We Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Future with Imagination
Chapter One: The Golden Elephant
    Analysis: Deep Learning, Big Data, Internet/Finance Applications, AI Externalities
Chapter Two: Gods Behind the Masks
    Analysis: Computer Vision, Convolutional Neural Networks, Deepfakes, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Biometrics, AI Security
Chapter Three: Twin Sparrows
    Analysis: Natural Language Processing, Self-Supervised Training, GPT-3, AGI and Consciousness, AI Education
Chapter Four: Contactless Love
    Analysis: AI Healthcare, AlphaFold, Robotic Applications, COVID Automation Acceleration
Chapter Five: My Haunting Idol
    Analysis: Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), Ethical and Societal Issues
Chapter Six: The Holy Driver
    Analysis: Autonomous Vehicles, Full Autonomy and Smart Cities, Ethical and Social Issues
Chapter Seven: Quantum Genocide
    Analysis: Quantum Computers, Bitcoin Security, Autonomous Weapons and Existential Threat
Chapter Eight: The Job Savior
    Analysis: AI Job Displacement, Universal Basic Income (UBI), What AI Cannot Do, 3Rs as a Solution to Displacement
Chapter Nine: Isle of Happiness
    Analysis: AI and Happiness, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Personal Data, Privacy Computing Using Federated Learning and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)
Chapter Ten: Dreaming of Plenitude
    Analysis: Plenitude, New Economic Models, the Future of Money, Singularity
Acknowledgments
Other Titles
About the Authors