A screen shows referees judging after the match featuring Chinese Go player Ke Jie against Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo
Credit: WU HONG /EPA
When Google challenged a Chinese board game champion to play its artificial intelligence programme AlphaGo, the invitation was read as an attempt by the American tech giant to build bridges in a lucrative market where it was struggling to gain traction.
But the 2017 face-off between the US and China, over one of the world’s most complex board games Go (with AlphaGo making its moves via a human handler), resulted in a very different outcome.
AlphaGo triumphed over 19-year-old world champion Go player, Ke Jie — not once, but three times. After the match, Ke Jie described AlphaGo as a God-like being that "can defeat anyone or anything". It made me feel primitive, he said.
The loss resonated in China. But instead of welcoming Google for its superior technology, China accelerated efforts to rival it and to battle the US for the title of global AI heavyweight.
Since then, the Chinese Communist Party has continued funnelling investment into R&D and its homegrown tech companies. As a result, Chinese AI firms, such as drone maker DJI, are growing into household names and this year the country overtook the US in the number of AI citations in academic journals — considered as a barometer of influence.
But as the competition between Chinese and US tech intensifies, a "new tech cold war" is being expressed as the countries trade insults over each other’s companies.
In December, DJI joined Huawei on a US trade blacklist, over alleged ties to the Chinese government. Last week, China announced it was restricting the use of Tesla vehicles by military staff and employees of key state-owned companies, citing national security concerns.
For Britain, this on-going struggle for tech supremacy, expected to continue under President Joe Biden, leaves the country in what Nigel Inkster, former director of intelligence and operations at MI6, describes as "an awkward balancing act".
He says: "[The UK] is torn between the interests of the economic ministries, which are concerned with having the best possible commercial and economic relationship with China to attract Chinese investments and so on, versus the security ministries that are more cautious."
Gross domestic expenditures on R&D
Last week’s "integrated review" saw Prime Minister Boris Johnson bring the dilemma of trying to navigate a new world, split between technology titans, to life.
The document sketched out a strategy that attempts to prioritise US relations while simultaneously pursuing "deeper trade links and more Chinese investment".
"We’re going to have to learn to live with a more globally dominant China and we’re probably not going to want to make a binary choice between the US versus China," says Inkster, who is also author of The Great Decoupling: China, America and the Struggle for Technological Supremacy.
Analysts however believe it will be difficult to woo Chinese investment if Johnson follows through on the review’s threats to crack down on "digital authoritarianism", a type of political ideology which leverages commercial technology tools to limit freedoms.
"China is one of the leading, if not the leading country in exporting facial recognition AI and AI more generally," says Noam Yuchtman, an economics professor at LSE, who has carried out research which found China is disproportionately exporting its technology to other autocracies.
He points to the use of Huawei technology in Tajikistan’s capital Dushanbe which has helped to identify 1.7 million traffic offenses committed on the city’s roads over the past five years, and the surveillance system sold by another Chinese telecommunications firms ZTE to Iran which reports claim is capable of monitoring landline, mobile and internet communications.
"This helps to create a bigger block of autocracy [where countries] work together to frustrate the geopolitical aims of the world’s democracies," Yuchtman adds.
China tensions | Biden follows Trump’s lead to continue assault on tech firms
However it’s not only autocracies where Chinese tech is leaking into a market previously dominated by US firms.
Despite calls from intelligence agencies to curb such "smart city" contracts with Chinese surveillance firms here in the UK, as of February, at least 16 London councils were in possession of technology made by Hikvision or Dahua — two Chinese firms which are also under trade restrictions in the United States.
Concerns are not limited to commercial dominance, instead they are raising the alarm that more dominant Chinese technology companies could spark a major cultural shift.
"If you’re making technologies, your worldview very much bakes into the way that you design the system and we haven’t had to confront that before, says Emily Taylor, CEO of Oxford Information Labs.
For years, the UK has happily existed inside a US dominated technology ecosystem, accepting the accompanying consequences — an increased importance of freedom of speech and the way political talking points quickly leak across the pond via social media.
"Yes, there are lots of differences between Europe and the US. But fundamentally, we’re democracies," says Taylor. "China’s a very different type of technical superpower."
Right now, countries worried about the motivations behind Chinese technology can choose to ban it, as the UK did last year when it called for "high-risk vendors", such as Huawei, to be removed from 5G networks.
At a glance | Five Chinese internet giants
The ability to do that could change, says Taylor, as China lobbies international groups that are in charge of setting the global rules that govern emerging technologies, including AI.
"Standards that [are set by] bodies like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), or even the ISO [International Organization for Standardization], are protected under World Trade Organisation rules from being banned technologies," she adds.
"If you have a piece of equipment that reflects those standard World Trade Organisation rules, it’s prevented from being banned in international trade, and that means you couldn’t do a repeat of the sort of Huawei 5G exercise," says Taylor. "It wouldn’t be lawful."
The integrated review also suggests technology standards will be an area where the UK expects to be active.
But with the UK signalling it wants to join the US on the key fronts in the battle for tech and AI supremacy — such as tech standards and the spread of digital authoritarianism — is it possible to be key trading partners with China too?
Former MI6 operations director, Inkster, believes it is: "It’s not a particularly tidy or graceful posture, but we managed it thus far".
Свежие комментарии