AI luminary Kai-Fu Lee and sci-fi author Chen Qiufan predict the future in ‘AI 2041’ – TechCrunch

Exactly where will today’s systems direct us above the next 20 a long time, and what will an AI-infused environment glimpse like throughout the globe? Sinovation founder and AI believed leader Kai-Fu Lee and breakout sci-fi author Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chen) make an educated guess in “AI 2041: 10 Visions for Our Future” a established of 10 tales and 10 essays discovering and describing the opportunity and pitfalls of AI.

Soon after reading through the e book — I’ll be publishing a evaluation soon and TechCrunch recently posted an excerpt — I talked with Lee and Chen at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 about how the collaboration came about, how their factors of watch coincided and differed, and why they think the potential will be how they explain it.

(Offers have been frivolously edited for clarity.)

Lee and Chen identified each and every other a number of a long time in the past — one particular a thriving imagined leader and entrepreneur in AI, the other an creator whose incisive depictions of in close proximity to-future dilemmas earned him worldwide acclaim. They resolved to collaborate on a hybrid perform that would have narratives born out of knowledgeable speculation and expository items illustrated by narrative.

Graphic Credits: Forex | Random Residence

“It’s seriously to notify the whole story of AI, since AI is so crucial. Every person should know additional about it, but it is also a minor bit scary due to the fact it appears complex,” Lee instructed me. “And what far better way to tell the tale than by really telling stories?”

“We knew just about every other briefly back again in the day in Google, and I was constantly wondering about producing a ebook about future technological innovation, centered on extremely specific science, details and theories,” Chen said. “But without the need of Kai-Fu, I could not do that, mainly because I’m not the qualified in the domain.”

The outcome of their collaboration is “AI 2041”: 10 stories by Chen established in the titular yr, all over the earth, with folks from all walks of life encountering AI in the several means that the authors think it could occur to form modern society in excess of the future two many years. Just about every tale is followed by an explanatory essay by Lee that goes into the complex aspects and why they could lead to that upcoming.

The tales are unbiased but materialize in some thing like a shared earth, every single illustrating a likely application, conflict or transform in considering that AI could direct to. Importantly, the AI is recognizable as an evolution of existing technologies.

“We began with a framework of 4 matters,” explained Lee. “One is I preferred to protect all around 15 systems in 10 tales. I also wished to buy them so that they go from straightforward to hard, so it’s sort of like an AI textbook — you know, you understand it by examining stories. Then we the two wished it to be in diverse industries, like instruction and health care and so on, to demonstrate that AI impacts all over the place. And then finally, Stanley wanted it to be in 10 diverse nations.”

Choose for example the story “Gods Behind the Masks.” It issues a proficient deepfake creator functioning out of Lagos who is aware of the ins and outs of generative adversarial networks, picture inspection, media pathways and so on. He is tasked with producing a online video of a prolonged-useless movie star that fools not just individuals viewing it, but the web hosting service’s automated scanners, the government’s facial recognition algorithms and all the relaxation — but he starts to suspect there’s an unsavory motive behind it all (I will not spoil the rest).