It is the artificial intelligence (AI) the field in which China is preparing its future global primacy and in which it is investing more resources, both human and financial. The field that, to put it in the words of Andrew Ng1, professor at Standford, "will change the world of the factory just as a hundred years ago he made electricity ".
But let's go step by step. By the term "artificial intelligence" is meant2 "the set of technologies that automate the activities associated with human thought, including decision-making, those connected with the solution of problems and those of learning".
A technological sector whose development, although still at the beginning, already allows computers to learn to act independently, taking decisions based solely on the available data and not on the programming received.
For several years now, in this field, China's competition with the rest of the world has been going on tightly; not only with the USA, which holds global leadership in research and development (R&D) and hardware production, but also with the UK, Canada and the European Union.
Beijing's commitment to AI begins in 2006 with a $ 75 USD commitment for the 2006 - 2020 period and the nationwide launch of 16 mega projects.
In the 2015, the leadership of the Dragon launches the "Made in China 2025" plan (in Mandarin Zhōngguó zhìzào 2025, 中国 制造 2025), which aims to transform the Chinese industry into an 4.0 industry, ensuring its leadership in the field in a decade. technological.
But we must wait for the XIX Congress of the Chinese Communist Party of 2017 for its definitive consecration, with the declaration of the leader Xi Jinping to make the future China "a scientific and technological superpower ", in which AI will play a decisive part.
A formal commitment, that of the Chinese management, in line with the unstoppable development of the sector, which in 2016 recorded an output of about 10 billion USD, the following year increased to 15 billion USD, and which for 2020 is estimated ten times as much. Unimaginable results only a few ago, the result of the particular "ecosystem" created, which encourages, with government approval, R&D activities on the one hand and "doing business" on the other.
Beijing's strategy is developed in parallel in the fields ofhardware, in that of data and in research and development (primarily algorithms).
In the first field, it encourages technology transfer through acquisitions of foreign brands and the creation of joint ventures with foreign signatures. The establishment of research centers in European or US cities in the scientific field allows "breathe the appropriate air"And facilitates the transfer of knowledge. Thanks to this strategy, China has been able to realize well 167 advanced computing centers (three more than the US owns today).
Nevertheless, China still looks back compared to the American competitor: just think that today it produces only 13% of its needs for integrated circuits.
The exact opposite of what happens in the field of gods data collected where Beijing stands out mainly for the large amount available, made possible by the absence of national legislation to protect privacy and the significant number of users (are 800 million, just to cite an example, Chinese citizens who connect every day to the web from mobile platforms).
Aware of the importance of this record for the future of AI, China favors a policy of continuous exchange between public and private subjects, which allows the transfer of personal data of users from government offices to service companies and vice versa. Suffice it to say that according to the president of the Beijing Academy of Sciences, within 2020 China will manage the 20% of data globally: about 44 trillion gigabytes.
Also in the field of research the Chinese are demonstrating a particular ability, especially evident in the development of algorithms already developed by others. In this sector, China already has 39.000 researchers compared to more than 72.000 Americans; and about 200.000 are the skilled workers who worked in the field of artificial intelligence during the 2017, with an annual increase of 20-30%.
Numbers, which in addition to giving the sense of an important scientific commitment, are also the consequence of the policies undertaken by Beijing to attract some of the 400.000, among Chinese engineers and researchers specialized in AI, who still work abroad. One of the most successful programs, the "China Talent Program", has so far allowed the return of 1510 researchers on 6200 questions, which have been guaranteed a salary from 70% to 150% of that received by Western research centers.
It is also thanks to this policy of openness that Beijing holds, from the 2014, the world leadership in the number of registered patents and published researches.
A very important fact - referring to numerous sectors including: home automation, unmanned vehicles, security, robotics, cybersecurity, facial and vocal recognition and instant translation - which however does not follow an equivalent number of citations in the scientific literature of the sector: this aspect which denotes, if nothing else, a persistent qualitative deficit in research work.
Nonetheless, China can boast (2017 data reported in June) 23% of 2.542 companies engaged in the world in the field of artificial intelligence, against the American 42%.
242 are the research / production centers operating in Beijing alone, while 112 in Shanghai and 93 are in Shenzhen. Also Chinese are the first three global big players: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (the so-called BAT).
At the moment, the field on which research and application is most concentrated is that of social control, very important for a state whose population now reaches one billion four hundred million people.
The technology so far developed, which allows the biometric control of individuals, combined with the cited availability of personal data, already allows a database of over one billion individual positions, which, only referring to 2016, has allowed the arrest of about 4000 identified criminals thanks to the facial recognition obtained with cameras mounted on police helmets (last May, in the vast northwestern region of Xinjiang, a researcher was identified by surveillance personnel and arrested in a stadium of 20.000 people).
But it is on the project of "system of social credit ", ie the possibility of assigning an individual "vote and judgment" based on their civic behavior, that Beijing is investing the most important resources.
The plan envisages "putting into the system", thanks to the network and the collaboration of all the managers of public services, the interactions of each Chinese citizen verifying the goodness of his "social behavior".
Payments of bills and loan installments, use of social media and the web, ability to generate social and workplace respect: all this, and much more, will contribute to give a score that will affect, in the future, not only the access to credit, but also to schools, universities, the purchase of train and air tickets, the possibility of skipping waiting lists in public hospitals, etc.
It is mainly on this system that Beijing intends to set up "internal governance" in the future, creating an "Orwellian" memory company that we thought existed only in the imagination of the British writer and essayist3.
The technological revolution under way, including the predominant use of artificial intelligence, is its main tool.
1 Associate Professor at Stanford University, is co-founder of Coursera. He worked at Google and Baidu.
3 George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (Motihari, 25 June 1903 - London, 21 January 1950), was a writer, essayist, journalist and British activist.
(photo: web / Ministry of National Defense of the People's Republic of China)
