The West should stop worrying about China's AI revolution

In recent decades, a booming manufacturing sector--and market reforms encouraging foreign trade and investment--have helped bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, creating business empires and transforming Chinese society. The plan calls for homegrown AI to match that developed in the West within three years, for China's researchers to be making "major breakthroughs" by 2025, and for Chinese AI to be the envy of the world by 2030. "When the Chinese government announces a plan like this, it has significant implications for the country and the economy," says Andrew Ng, a prominent AI expert who previously oversaw AI technology and strategy at China's biggest online search company, Baidu. The country's tech companies, led by the Internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, are hiring scores of AI experts, building new research centers, and investing in data centers that rival anything operated by Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.