How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty
years?
A WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST
BOOK OF THE YEAR - "This inspired collaboration between a pioneering
technologist and a visionary writer of science fiction offers bold and
urgent insights."--Yann LeCun, winner of the Turing Award; chief AI
scientist, Facebook
**"Amazingly entertaining . . . Lee and Chen take us on an immersive
trip through the future. . . . Eye-opening."--Mark Cuban
**
AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within
two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will
generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education
through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand-new forms of
communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work,
however, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our
economic and social order. Meanwhile, AI will bring new risks in the
form of autonomous weapons and smart technology that inherits human
bias. AI is at a tipping point, and people need to wake up--both to AI's
radiant pathways and its existential perils for life as we know it.
In this provocative, utterly original work, Kai-Fu Lee, the former
president of Google China and bestselling author of AI Superpowers,
teams up with celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan to imagine our world in
2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping short stories,
they introduce readers to an array of eye-opening 2041 settings, such
as:
- In San Francisco, the "job reallocation" industry emerges as deep
learning AI causes widespread job displacement
- In Tokyo, a music fan is swept up in an immersive form of celebrity
worship based on virtual reality and mixed reality
- In Mumbai, a teenage girl rebels when AI's crunching of big data gets
in the way of romance
- In Seoul, virtual companions with perfected natural language
processing (NLP) skills offer orphaned twins new ways to connect
- In Munich, a rogue scientist draws on quantum computing, computer
vision and other AI technologies in a revenge plot that imperils the
world
By gazing toward a not-so-distant horizon, AI 2041 offers urgent
insights into our collective future--while reminding readers that,
ultimately, humankind remains the author of its destiny.
