Artificial Intelligence is the big trend of the future. Machine translation, intelligent control, expert systems, robotics, language and image understanding, genetically programmed robot factories, automated programming, aerospace applications, huge information processing, storage and management, performing tasks that cannot be performed by chemically synthesized lifeforms or tasks that are complex or large in scale, and so on. Competitive pressures are going to be there, which just shows how popular AI majors are, so it's great to study a major in AI. Although these are not for everyone, there is a lot of talent for our country and the world, so the competitive pressure will definitely be there. It is necessary to keep learning and exploring new knowledge.
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For China, the development of artificial intelligence is a historic strategic opportunity, which is crucial to alleviate the pressure of population aging in the future, to meet the challenges of sustainable development, as well as to promote the transformation and upgrading of economic structure.
While "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) has become a concept known to almost everyone, the definition of AI has not yet been universally ****recognized. The traditional idea of AI development is to study how humans generate intelligence and then have machines learn how people think and behave. John McCarthy, the author of the modern concept of artificial intelligence, argued that machines do not necessarily need to think like humans to gain intelligence, and that the point is to enable machines to solve problems that the human brain can solve.
The fourth industrial revolution is upon us, and artificial intelligence has gradually moved from science fiction to reality. Since the concept of artificial intelligence was first proposed in 1956, the development of artificial intelligence has gone through several ups and downs. With the breakthroughs in core algorithms, the rapid increase in computing power, and the support of massive amounts of Internet data, AI finally ushered in a qualitative leap in the second decade of the 21st century, becoming the focus of global attention to science and technology. Since AIphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol in 2016, global excitement and concern over the development of AI have been intertwined.
Even so, countries around the world have recognized AI as a key playing field for future competition among nations, and thus have begun to deploy AI development strategies in a bid to occupy the historical high point of a new round of technological revolution. For China, the development of AI is a historic strategic opportunity, which is crucial for alleviating the pressure of population aging in the future, meeting the challenges of sustainable development, and promoting the transformation and upgrading of economic structure.
This article depicts the development of AI in China from the aspects of scientific and technological output and talent investment, industrial development and market application, development strategy and policy environment.
Science and Technology Output and Talent Input
1. Paper Output : China's total number of AI papers and the number of highly cited papers are the first in the world. China's global share of papers in AI grew from 4.26% in 1997 to 27.68% in 2017, far ahead of other countries. Colleges and universities are the absolute main force of AI paper output, and 87 of the top 100 institutions in the world in terms of paper output are colleges and universities. The AI paper output of China's top universities has been outstanding globally. Not only that, China's highly cited papers have shown a rapid growth trend, and overtook the United States to become the world's first in 2013. However, only the State Grid Corporation of China is ranked in the top 20 in the global ranking of corporate paper output. In terms of discipline distribution, computer science, engineering and automatic control system are the disciplines with the largest distribution of AI papers. The impact of international cooperation on AI output is obvious, with 42.64% of high-level papers published in China through international cooperation.
2. Patenting: China is slightly ahead of the United States and Japan in terms of patenting, with the national grid standing out. China has become the country with the largest number of AI patents in the world, slightly ahead of the US and Japan, while China, the US and Japan account for 74% of the overall global patent disclosures. Global patent applications are mainly concentrated in the sub-directions of speech recognition, image recognition, robotics and machine learning. Among the top 30 AI patent holders in China, research institutes, universities and enterprises perform equally well, accounting for 52% and 48% of technical inventions respectively. The performance of major patent holders among enterprises varies greatly, especially China's State Grid, which has seen rapid development of AI-related technologies in the past five years, with a much higher volume of patented technologies laid out domestically than other patent holders, and is ranked fourth in the global ranking of enterprises. China's patented technologies are concentrated in areas such as data processing systems and digital information transmission, with patents related to image processing and analysis accounting for 16% of the total number of inventions. Power engineering has also become an important area of China's AI patent layout.
3. Talent input : China's total number of AI talents ranks second in the world, but the proportion of outstanding talents is low. As of 2017, China's AI talent possession reached 18,232, accounting for 8.9% of the world's total, second only to the United States (13.9% ). Universities and research institutions are the main carriers of AI talents, with Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences system becoming the institutions with the largest input of AI talents in the world. However, there are only 977 outstanding talents in China as measured by the high H-factor (also known as the H index, which evaluates scientists' research performance), less than one-fifth of that of the United States, and ranking sixth in the world. The amount of corporate talent investment is relatively low, with high-intensity talent investment concentrated in the U.S., and only one Chinese company, Huawei, in the global top 20. China's AI talent is concentrated in the eastern and central parts of the country, but individual western cities such as Xi'an and Chengdu are also prominent. International AI talents are concentrated in the fields of machine learning, data mining and pattern recognition, while China's AI talents are more scattered in their research fields.
Industrial Development and Market Application
1. Enterprise Scale : The number of AI enterprises in China is the second largest in the world, and Beijing is the city with the highest concentration of AI enterprises in the world. As of June 2018, the total number of AI enterprises monitored globally*** amounted to 4,925, of which 2,028 AI enterprises in the United States ranked first in the world. The total number of AI enterprises in China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) is 1011, ranking second in the world, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada and India (Figure 1):
From the city scale (Figure 2), among the top 20 cities in the world in terms of the number of AI enterprises, the United States accounts for 9, China accounts for 4, Canada accounts for 3, and the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Israel each account for 1. Among them, Beijing became the city with the highest number of AI companies in the world, followed by San Francisco and London. Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou are also among the top 20 AI companies in the world.
In terms of the time of establishment (Figure 3), the emergence of AI startups in China was concentrated in 2012-2016, peaking in 2015 with 228 new startups. The growth rate of startups slowed down from 2016 onwards.
The average age of AI companies in China is 5.5 years. Among them, Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are crowded with startups, and the average age of enterprises is younger compared to the national average, with an average age of less than 5.5 years. Shandong and Liaoning, where there are more transformations of established industrial robotics and automation companies, have relatively older companies.
Artificial Intelligence application technology mainly includes speech technology (including speech recognition, speech synthesis, etc.), vision technology (including biometrics, image recognition, video recognition, etc.) and natural language processing technology (including machine translation, text mining, sentiment analysis, etc.). Taking basic hardware into account, the distribution of application technologies of domestic and foreign AI enterprises is shown in Figure 4. Compared with foreign countries, the application technologies of Chinese AI enterprises are more focused on vision and speech, while the proportion of basic hardware is small.
Artificial intelligence in industry applications include intelligent robots, intelligent driving, drones, AR/VR, big data and data services, and various vertical applications (defined as "AI+" in this paper). The industry application distribution of domestic and foreign AI enterprises is shown in Figure 5. It can be seen that, compared with foreign countries, domestic enterprises pay more attention to the market for end products such as intelligent robots, drones and intelligent driving, while foreign enterprises pay more attention to the application of AI in various vertical industries.
2. Venture Capital : China has become the largest country in the world in terms of AI investment and financing. Since 2013, the scale of investment and financing in the global and Chinese AI industry has been on a rising trend (Figure 6).In 2017, the total scale of global AI investment and financing amounted to $39.5 billion, with 1208 financing events, of which China's investment and financing totaled $27.71 billion, with 369 financing events. The total financing of Chinese AI companies accounted for 70% of the total global financing, and the number of financing events reached 31%.
Based on the global investment and financing data from 2013 to the first quarter of 2018, China has surpassed the United States to become the world's most "gold-absorbing" country in terms of the scale of AI financing, but the United States still leads the world in terms of the number of investment and financing.
Development Strategy and Policy Environment
1. International Comparison: AI strategies and policies of different countries have their own focus. Since 2013, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, and other countries have introduced artificial intelligence strategies and policies. Each country's AI strategy has its own focus, with the United States focusing on the impact of AI on economic development, scientific and technological leadership, and national security; the European Union countries focusing on the ethical risks brought by AI in terms of security, privacy, dignity, etc.; Japan hoping that AI will promote the construction of its super-intelligent society; and China's AI policy focusing on the realization of AI industrialization to help China's strategy of becoming a strong manufacturing country. Policies also differ greatly in terms of R&D focus and key application areas.
2. National Policy: From Internet of Things, to Big Data, to Artificial Intelligence. From 2009 to the present, the evolution of China's AI policy can be categorized into five phases, and its core theme words are constantly changing, reflecting the different development priorities of each phase.
National-level policies focused on basic scientific research such as the Internet of Things, information security, and databases in the early stages, big data and infrastructure in the middle stages, while AI became the most central theme after 2017, and intellectual property protection also became an important theme. Taken together, China's AI policy focuses on the following six areas : Made in China, innovation drive, IoT, Internet of Things, Internet +, big data, science and technology research and development.
3. Local policies : Responding to national strategies, local policy themes vary from place to place. Local governments have actively responded to the national AI development strategy, of which, Made in China 2025 is at the core of the AI policy application network and plays a programmatic role in the process of local AI policy formulation. Judging by the number of policy releases, the regions where China's AI development is currently active are mainly centered in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao. The policy themes also vary greatly by province, for example, Jiangsu Province focuses on basic R&D areas such as infrastructure, IoT and cloud computing, Guangdong Province focuses on AI applications such as manufacturing and robotics, while Fujian Province focuses on IoT, big data, innovation platforms and intellectual property rights, with policies in each region closely related to local development conditions.
Comprehensive impact on society
With the full development of artificial intelligence, labor productivity and productivity levels, people's life experience will be more colorful, will be more people from physical labor and even routine mental labor to liberate, and more into creative activities, so that human beings themselves and the community to get more fully developed. At present, the rapid advancement of AI technology is constantly changing the development mode of retail, agriculture, logistics, education, medical care, finance, business and other fields, and reconfiguring production, distribution, exchange, consumption and other links. According to IDC data, in the next five years, the application of artificial intelligence technology to a number of industries will greatly improve the operational efficiency of these industries, specifically to improve the efficiency of the education industry 82%, 71% of the retail industry, 64% of the manufacturing industry, 58% of the financial industry.
1. The impact of artificial intelligence on education and employment. The ultimate goal of developing AI is not to replace humans, but to help them become smarter, and education will play a key role in this process. Artificial intelligence technology enhances the production capacity in economic activities, which makes people gradually withdraw from mechanical repetitive or dangerous labor, thus increasing leisure time for thinking and appreciation, and focusing more on the development and enhancement of potentials of creativity, thinking ability, aesthetics and imagination.
At present, the application of AI in the field of education mainly focuses on the following aspects : adaptive ( personalized ) learning, virtual tutors, educational robots, science and technology education based on programming and robotics, and scenario-based education based on virtual reality / augmented reality. By learning in a way that suits you, not only will you be more efficient, but you will also maintain your interest in learning for a longer period of time.
The significance of deep development of AI in education is not to replace teachers, but to assist them in making teaching more efficient and interesting. In addition, in the education system affected by AI technology, the requirements for talents' information input and output ability, independent learning ability, etc. have suddenly increased, and the cultivation of innovation ability has also become an important direction.
With the development of technology gradually replacing human beings in most of the tedious and repetitive work or manual labor, it brings unprecedented challenges while bringing benefits to people. Today, more and more people are worried about whether their jobs will be replaced by AI technology, or whether they will have to survive in the "cracks" left by AI. Some experts have estimated the probability that jobs in China will be replaced by AI, and the results show that in the next 20 years, about 76% of the total workforce will be affected by AI technology, or 65% if only the non-agricultural population is taken into account. At the same time, however, the job-creating effects of AI technology are already being felt. Surveys show that Chinese tech companies are now expanding their AI teams by an average of 20 percent, and this demand is set to grow. In addition, experts at the Education and Examination Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology say China's demand for talent in the AI field could rise to 5 million in the next few years.
It can be judged that, in the context of AI reshaping the industrial landscape and consumer demand, some jobs will eventually be eliminated by history, but a series of new jobs will also be incubated along with AI technology. On the other hand, a new type of human-machine relationship is being constructed, and non-programmed cognitive jobs will become more and more difficult to replace, with higher demands on human innovation, thinking and imagination.
Mechanization and intelligence are shaping the new employment pattern, but we should also be alert to the possible derivative problems under the new pattern, such as the gap between the rich and the poor and the social stability caused by the rising unemployment rate. The "impact" of artificial intelligence is persistent, and the multiple impacts on education and employment are also persistent, so it is also necessary to actively explore the education and employment mechanism that matches and adapts to the technological revolution.
2. The impact of artificial intelligence on privacy and security. Today, in many life consumption scenarios, people's demand for personalized experience continues to increase, and personalized and scenario-based services are gradually becoming the main direction of AI-driven innovation. In the context of socialization of information acquisition and fragmentation of time, service providers are focusing on establishing more flexible and convenient consumption scenarios to bring people a more friendly user experience. At the same time, with the development and maturity of voice recognition, face recognition, and machine learning algorithms, enterprises can truly understand their customers by analyzing their customer profiles, and accurate and differentiated services further enhance their sense of being valued and satisfied. However, while harboring great commercial value, it also poses certain challenges to the existing legal order and public **** security.
The virtual nature of cyberspace makes it easier to collect and share personal data, which greatly facilitates the process of storing, analyzing, and trading information such as identity numbers, health status, credit history, and location activity traces, while at the same time, it is difficult to trace the path and extent of personal data privacy leakage. For example, in the case of smart healthcare supported by AI technology, how to define the ownership of patients' electronic cases and private data, and how to regulate the boundaries of hospitals' authority to obtain and use private data. Another example is the copyright of works generated by AI technology. The open industry ecosystem makes it difficult for regulators to determine who to regulate, and makes the boundaries of the law increasingly fuzzy.
The widespread use of AI has led to a trend change in the "human-computer relationship", with frequent interaction between humans and machines, which can be said to have formed a new type of relationship that is embedded in each other. The boundaries of time and space have been broken, and the virtual and real have been switched at will, and the unpredictability and irreversibility of this trend is likely to trigger a series of potential risks. Unlike "information leakage", which is easily ignored by people, AI technology may be used by a few people with ulterior motives to commit fraud and other crimes. For example, based on personal information obtained by improper means to form a "data portrait", and through social software and so on, posing as acquaintances to carry out fraud. Another example is the use of artificial intelligence technology for learning and simulation, generating information including images, video, audio, and biometrics to break through security barriers. Last year, it was reported that the new Apple cell phone's "face-swipe" function was cracked, which is an example of this type. In terms of potential risks, drones, unmanned vehicles and smart robots are all subject to illegal intrusion and control, causing property damage or being used for criminal purposes.
3. The impact of AI on social equity. With the rapid progress of artificial intelligence research and development and application, a series of value problems are gradually appearing in front of people. At present, there are still a large number of people who do not know how to access the Internet, due to the objective conditions can not use the Internet and do not want to touch the Internet, has been defined as the "marginal people" in the era of artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence on the cultural level of the people, the degree of mastery of the flow of information and have higher requirements. The more advanced the AI technology, the deeper the information gap, and then evolved into a service gap, welfare gap, and in the era of artificial intelligence, "marginalized people" will be more and more difficult to enjoy convenient intelligent information services, and less likely to obtain the scarce service resources.
This article is reprinted from China Economic Report, Issue 10, 2018, by China Science and Technology Policy Research Center, Tsinghua University