Our world is in the midst of the greatest expansion of technology and the greatest concentration of wealth in human history. The center of the earth is now Silicon Valley. The central players in this story are a mere handful of companies—Apple, Google, OpenAI, Tesla, just to name a few—that dominate the markets and touch every part of our lives. Its epicenter may be on America’s West Coast, but the full technology story stretches across the world, too, defining our relationships with Europe and especially with China, our strongest geopolitical adversary.
To help us make sense of this world of technology, we’ve tapped Patrick McGee to join The Free Press as a contributing writer. Patrick’s reporting across the tech world has cut through the corporate claims and received wisdom of the tech industry. He is one of the world’s top experts on Apple, and his book Apple In China is an essential guide to the fraught relationship between the tech industry and the country it relies on to make its products. Patrick brings insights drawn from both corporate boardrooms and factory floors, and an eye for the truth behind the rhetoric. Here in his first column for The Free Press, he takes on the big ambitions of American AI—and how China could blow them up. —The Editors
The biggest risk with artificial intelligence is that it’s humanity’s last invention: We build “God in a box” and it decides to wipe people from the planet. This is the bleak scenario envisioned by the AI doomers and books like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.
Give some thought, though, to the less existential but far more likely risk: that America’s grand bet is outgunned by China’s more mundane and pragmatic AI strategy. While American companies concentrate resources on a moon shot—investing in frontier models to create a superintelligence to tackle every problem—Chinese companies are rapidly applying “good enough” AI to leverage their existing superiority in manufacturing and logistics.
For the average American, AI means chatbots. Big Tech firms are pouring unprecedented sums into chips and data centers to accelerate “deep learning”—the technique behind training neural networks that gave rise to ChatGPT. In China, the emphasis is more on deploying similar deep learning networks into every nook and cranny of the economy, giving machines increasing autonomy. AI algorithms are being used to guide robotic arms in factories, screen patients in hospitals, and eliminate defects on the production line.
The U.S. has framed AI as a race, with a single winner emerging into what a White House report last year called “a new golden age of human flourishing.” Top AI executives in the U.S. routinely talk about how deep learning will lead to what they call artificial general intelligence (AGI), in which AI models will master every subject in the human domain. To get there, American companies are promising to spend more than $1 trillion on data centers alone by 2030.
