In the struggle for AI supremacy, China will prevail

CHINA'S "Sputnik moment" came on May 27th 2017. On that day an algorithm thrashed Ke Jie, the world's best player of Go, an ancient and demanding Chinese board game. Mr Ke's defeat by AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by DeepMind, a British firm that had been bought by Google, was as much a blow to China's psyche as the Soviet satellite was to America's self-esteem in 1957. Within months, China announced ambitious plans to dominate AI by 2030. Kai-Fu Lee thinks it will succeed. He is well placed to judge.