Kai-Fu Lee

As I concluded the final pages of Kai-Fu Lee’s book, somewhat annoyed by the weakness of the ending, I wondered what this world is going to look like when AI replaces many of our routine tasks and work lives.

I can tell you what our world looks like today: interminable gridlock on Toronto streets. Thousands of cars making trips that needn’t be taken at all. Polluting the air. Throwing up pointless tons of CO-2 emissions.

Why couldn’t people make the same trips with VR glasses to virtual workplaces and eliminate the physical consumption of resources? And schools. And malls. And govt facilities.

AI could help build these virtual places.… (more)

This book cleverly juxtaposes science fiction and technical analysis to illustrate and expound ten major areas in which AI is already transforming the world we know. The SF stories, translated from Chinese by various translators, are uneven in quality, but some are quite good, as is the analysis that follows each. Not everything here is new -- there have been plenty of books on some of these ten areas such as games, jobs, technology, and warfare -- but the assemblage here adds up to something new and devastating. AI comes across as an enormous, unstoppable, hydra-headed beast. Its alliance with the forces of capitalism will be inseparably intimate and the combined result overpowering. We should probably all acquaint ourselves with AI's big picture -- how virtually nothing will escape it -- and this book offers probably the best acreage of canvas to do so.… (more)