La Jornada: Artificial intelligence drives China’s fourth industrial revolution

Beijing. The deployment of intelligent and quite agile robots is just an exhibition. Kung fu kicks, boxing punches, the movement of “hips” to the rhythm of music and the mechanisms that try to replicate the winks of a human face are just pedagogy to communicate China’s main State policy: making artificial intelligence (AI) become “tangible”, applied and transversal to its real economy.

The development of AI is at the center of Chinese politics like no other time. The deployment of the basic tools for “the fourth industrial revolution has a starring role as the springboard that could allow China to become a world power; just as the steam engine was for England, and electricity, computing and the Internet for the United States. We can see that each time the world experiences rapid development of science and technology, this influences the distribution of power. It influences international relations,” said Jun Jisheng, vice president of the China University of Foreign Affairs.

“Now we are experiencing the fourth industrialization,” he added in a conference to journalists.

The Chinese government’s fifteenth five-year plan – launched in March – includes important aspects of scientific and technological innovation, including AI, as a core part of the so-called “fourth industrialization,” the academic explained.

History documents that countries that control and perfect the development of key tools in industrial eras are the ones that end up becoming global powers, he added.

“The steam engine contributed to the rise of the United Kingdom; we know that productivity increased enormously thanks to the invention of this machine and the railway. Then came the second industrialization with the invention of electricity, and the third, with the Internet and computers in the 1960s in the United States. This always leads to the rise of certain economies because they have made the most of these technological advances. Now AI has developed very quickly,” Jun Jisheng stressed.

However, this technological development does not go alone. “Economic influence, the development of science and technology are also changing the world,” said the academic. “That is why, when we talk about global governance, we say that we must also pay more attention to the governance of AI. Let’s make sure that it is beneficial for humanity,” he noted, after giving the example of the use of “low-altitude tools dominated by AI”, but among its applications are drones that carry out armed attacks, as well as the cascade of fake news that is carried out with AI.

Beyond the dancing robots, martial arts experts, or pets that have been seen in the Asian giant for years, but whose skills are growing, China seeks to apply this development in something broader and more concrete: scaling algorithms and neural processes of AI to what the steam engine, the railway, or electricity meant at the time; that is, to its extensive production.

With a view to this objective, last August it launched the AI+ (artificial intelligence plus) plan, which summarizes using AI not only as a development in itself, but as transversal infrastructure applied to productive sectors.

The goals are for 70 percent of society to have AI incorporated into its processes by 2027 and for it to cover 90 percent by 2030.

This means incorporating AI into manufacturing, health services, education, mobility, finance; Its application is even being outlined in an area that several societies around the world: a system of care and support for older adults. That is, lowering a technology that in the West is even perceived as inflated by Wall Street’s disembodied scaffolding to the real economy through production and services.

The next generation

The fifteenth five-year plan, the Chinese State’s roadmap for its short, medium and long-term goals and objectives, includes this deployment of a State policy whose focus is on computing centers, the development of chips, the regulation of data and algorithms, without leaving aside such core areas as biotechnology, advanced energy systems or 6G, the next generation in telecommunications networks.

The deployment of automation could seem like a shot in the foot for an economy that has a population of 1.4 billion inhabitants and a workforce of 773 million workers; However, in China AI is not left to the free market, it is the State that manages it and, at that point, the goal is to find new occupations linked to technological development.