Kai-fu Lee
Kai-Fu Lee wasn’t a name familiar to me until I heard him in a podcast where he was talking about the book. Based in China, he is considered an expert in AI, and has worked with Google, Microsoft, and Apple. The book has an interesting structure consisting of ten stories, with a commentary by Lee after every story on the subjects covered in it. The storytelling is in collaboration with Chen Quifan, a Chinese science fiction writer, and the translations have been done by a handful of folks.
In the ten stories, Lee has attempted to stay away from predictions and used scenarios based on the extrapolation of current technologies. The stories, all set in 2041, are diverse not just in terms of the themes that are discussed, but also in the kind of protagonists they feature – spread across geographies and cultures, and socio-economic classes, and in many cases, quite relatable in terms of thinking and mindsets. Swinging neither towards dystopia or utopia, Lee tries to keep things pragmatic and optimistic.
The themes are pretty much a laundry list of all the technologies that one gets to hear about in discussions about the current and the future – from GDPR, big data, deep learning, neural networks, computer vision, deepfakes, GANs, biometrics, NLP, GPT-3, AGI to AlphaFold, VR, AR, MR, Brain-Computer Interface, Autonomous Vehicles, Smart Cities, Quantum Computers, Cryptocurrency, UBI and so on. But more importantly, the stories show how these can impact not just on individuals, but also societies and how we think, across multiple domains like finance, education, health, politics, entertainment, climate change, jobs and even happiness. It helps that the plot points are intriguing, interesting, and relatable.
This is an extremely accessible (and entertaining) read that not only introduced me to several new technologies and computing concepts I hadn’t heard of, but also gave possible scenarios about how life on the planet would be in a couple of decades.
P.S. My favourite story was ‘The Job Savior’, which covers job displacement, what UBI (Universal Basic Income) can/not do, and what happens to humans when their dignity of earning a living is taken away.
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