Article by Evan Osnos: “…For a long time, China looked west for visions of the future. These days, it favors its own. The Chinese car company BYD recently surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles. A popular clip shows Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, being asked in 2011 about competition from BYD, which was then known mainly for a boxy, undersized sedan; Musk laughed and said, “Have you seen their car?” Fifteen years later, China has more than a hundred automakers, competing for customers with such extravagant features as in-car karaoke, mechanical foot massagers, and video headlights that can project drive-in movies.
Lee, whose social-media posts have attracted more than fifty million followers, has a striking forecast for the two countries in which he has prospered. In his book “AI Superpowers,” published in 2018, he predicts a “new world order” with “waves of technology that will soon wash over the global economy and tilt the geopolitical landscape toward China.” That kind of prophecy suits the official mood in Beijing, where Xi Jinping, the President and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, calls technology the “main battlefield of international competition” and bluntly asserts that “the East is rising, and the West is declining.”
In July, the Chinese firm Moonshot released an A.I. model that performed comparably to its American competitors, at a fraction of the cost. Microchip stocks plunged, on fears that China will dominate A.I., much as it now dominates hardware. China produces at least seventy per cent of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar cells. It deploys more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and, in medicine, it has surpassed the United States in the number of registered clinical trials. Its shipbuilding capacity is roughly two hundred times that of the U.S., and some observers in Washington worry that American stockpiles of munitions would not match China’s in a war over Taiwan…(More)”.
