Artificial intelligence has become a dominating concept and is prevailing either it is medical industry or entertainment, commerce or politics, global trade or geopolitics. It is a concept that is revolutionizing the industry with new tech and development. In September 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the nation stating ‘Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly the future, not only for the Russia, but for all its all mankind. And whoever will become the leader in this industry will become the ruler of the world eventually’.
Artificial intelligence is connecting with geopolitics, which over the upcoming decades will increase to such a level that is not easy to comprehend today. With the ever increasing demand of AI, there is no time when we will all see the essence of artificial intelligence in manufacturing side, transportation side, effective trading side, improvement in crops yield, shuffling in labor market and more. In the coming years, all those countries who would be successful in cultivating and then harnessing the coming culture of AI innovation, will be directly heading towards economic stability, exceptional growth and improved national security. Whereas, those countries who would not be able to mark up their images with the AI will be facing increasing encounters in global sustainability effectiveness.
United State Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
According to McKinsey Global Institute, “America is one of the leading AI development leaders, who in Silicon Valley in San Francisco has number one global hubs for AI startups with more than two millions of workers”. They further added, “In 2016, the United States was among the top spots of high scale AI investments, making the US a successful country, engaging towards advancement and technology”.
Currently, United States is the global leader in artificial intelligence with an extensive ecosystem that includes all-encompassing AI research at foremost companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and IBM along with many startups that are deemed to be successful and highly recognized with the passage of time. The investment is at large, not only from across the globe in the US but the government itself is taking keen interest and investing every possible bit towards research and development. In 2018 at The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the government announced $2 Billion Campaign that would be used for the AI technology research and development.
Due to all these large investments, US is the world leading artificial intelligence human capital research center that is working far and beyond to dig in deep in this field.
China in Artificial Intelligence
China is working far and wide over the research and development of artificial intelligence and due to its high investments and continuous work, over the decades, it is expected that Chinese AI progress can certainly affect the investment going in the US. The political and business leaders in China have recently identified the crucial elements that are required for the continuous growth in the technological side of China.
Recently in 2018, Cambricon Technology has released its first cloud artificial intelligence chip MLU100, which is designed with precision to support image and facial recognition for artificial intelligence deep learning. This AI technology is being used in and deployed in millions of smartphones by third ranked handset manufacturing company, Huawei. Due to this progress, the Chinese government has visualized themselves with the ambition of becoming the global leader in artificial intelligence innovation by 2030. In the 2017 session at Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Chinese president stated, “Today, China’s economy is in a complete transition mode, growing rapidly to a stage of high-quality development. With the real economy of China, we will be promoting futuristic integration of internet, big data analysis and artificial intelligence that will drive the growth of the country in the digital sector”.
SenseTime is a facial recognition surveillance technology by Chinese artificial intelligence startup, which has the highest valuation of any startup in China ever with $4.5 billion. This clearly indicates the research and development ability in China towards the AI integration and marking prosperity with it.
Global Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem
Today, the United States and China are considered as key players in artificial intelligence field across the globe. But, Israel and the United Kingdom have started to thrive in the AI sector, whereas in earlier 2018, the French government announced a major investment in the artificial intelligence sector. With this, Japan, Russia and South Korea have also started to invest in AI consulting services startups so that they can also make and mark progress in this field.
There are numerous benefits if the nations properly invest in artificial intelligence services and AI solutions. With AI, it will become a lot easier to predict violent storms before it can even hit your country or any other country worldwide. It can be a great help in drugs development, reducing the disease and finding cures for them. It can also improve agricultural yield per annum, forecasting of supply required for countries and in other sectors. All these things have a larger impact on geopolitics. In September 2018, Washington Post piece, Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels stated that “Artificial Intelligence is becoming one of the powerful resources that can help in determining the fates of nations, way ahead of the time”.
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