Kai-Fu Lee

physical automation of the past century largely hurt blue-collar workers, but the coming decades of intelligent automation will

buying nearly as many as Europe and the Americas combined. Chinese CEOs and political leaders are united in pushing for the steady automation of many Chinese factories and farms.

technology and an industry, AI naturally gravitates toward monopolies. Its reliance on data for improvement creates a self-perpetuating cycle: better products lead to more users, those users lead to more data, and that data leads to even better products, and thus more users and data. Once a company has jumped out to an early lead, this kind of ongoing repeating cycle can turn that lead into an insurmountable barrier to entry for other firms.

They are building huge stores of data that are feeding into a variety of different product verticals, such as self-driving cars, language translation, autonomous drones, facial recognition, natural-language processing, and much more. The more data these companies accumulate, the harder it will be for companies in any other countries to ever compete.

AI spreads its tentacles into every aspect of economic life, the benefits will flow to these bastions of data and AI talent. PwC estimates that the United States and China are set to capture a full 70 percent of the $15.7 trillion that AI will add to the global economy by 2030, with China alone taking home $7 trillion. Other countries will be left to pick up the scraps, while these AI superpowers will boost productivity at home and harvest profits from markets around the globe. American companies will likely lay claim to many developed markets, and China’s AI juggernauts will have a better shot at winning over Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
I fear this process will exacerbate and significantly grow the divide between the AI haves and have-nots. While AI-rich countries rake in astounding profits, countries that haven’t crossed a certain technological and economic threshold will find themselves slipping backward and falling farther behind. With manufacturing and services increasingly done by intelligent machines located in the AI superpowers, developing countries will lose the one competitive edge that their predecessors used to kick-start development: low-wage factory labor.