Three days after the Trump administration published its much-anticipated AI action plan, the Chinese government put out its own AI policy blueprint. Was the timing a coincidence? China's "Global AI Governance Action Plan" was released on July 26, the first day of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), the largest annual AI event in China. Geoffrey Hinton and Eric Schmidt were among the many Western tech industry figures who attended the festivities in Shanghai. Our WIRED colleague Will Knight was also on the scene.

Artificial Intelligence leader SenseTime advocates fairness, and ethical and sustainable use of the technology. Paid Post: SenseTime. Topic | …

Written by Camylle Lanteigne (@CamLante), who's currently pursuing a Master's in Public Policy at Concordia University and whose work on social robots and empathy has been featured on Vox. This explainer was written in response to colleagues' requests to know more about temporal bias in AI ethics. It begins with a refresher on cognitive biases, then dives into: how humans understand time, time preferences, present-day preference, confidence changes, planning fallacies, and hindsight bias. Bias is a really big topic, but I'll try to succinctly define a subsection of it--implicit cognitive bias--in a way that is useful for AI ethics, particularly. Humans have cognitive biases, which means every one of us, to varying degrees, holds beliefs and impressions that are not backed up by fleshed out reasoning or evidence, or that we never bothered questioning in the first place.¹

AI will be a major growth driver for Asia in the coming decade. The company priorities for AI are to enhance customer satisfaction, speed up decision-making, and reduce inefficiencies. The loss of some roles to automation, and the restructuring of others to take advantage of technology-created capacity, are likely. Yet reducing headcount is not a top priority in and of itself. Just one-third of survey respondents listed the need to reduce labor costs as a top-three driver for AI.

AI will be a major growth driver for Asia in the coming decade. The company priorities for AI are to enhance customer satisfaction, speed up decision-making, and reduce inefficiencies. The loss of some roles to automation, and the restructuring of others to take advantage of technology-created capacity, are likely. Yet reducing headcount is not a top priority in and of itself. Just one-third of survey respondents listed the need to reduce labor costs as a top-three driver for AI.

Please disable your ad blocker for POST to be able to enjoy our free content. The research, which has been published in two reports, "Asia's AI agenda: The ecosystem" and "Asia's AI agenda: AI for business," is based on a multi-industry survey of 871 senior executives drawn from 13 Asia-Pacific markets. From China to Japan, Singapore to India, policymakers across Asia are developing national-level plans for using AI to enhance domestic and regional competitiveness. Business leaders are positive about the region's AI resources, particularly data availability and the quality of external talent. More can be done to bolster the R&D environment, and governments can still provide greater support.

Asia is past the halfway mark. More than half of the survey sample have already deployed AI technologies within their businesses. Of the 13 markets covered by the survey, the highest level of AI penetration is in North Asia--Japan and South Korea. Indonesia and Vietnam are at the most nascent stage, with just a quarter of companies using AI. Less than a third of the "AI adopters" have a centralized strategy for AI.

From the critical, like law enforcement, healthcare, and humanitarian aid, to the mundane, like dating and shopping, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be the answer to all our problems. AI is a catch-all phrase for a wide-ranging set of technologies most of which apply learning techniques from statistics to find patterns in large sets of data and make predictions based on those patterns. It seems like there are meetings every other week, organised by representatives from industry, government, academia, and civil society to address the perils of AI and formulate solutions to harness its potential. But who is driving the regulatory agenda and what do they stand to gain? This question needs to be answered because letting industry needs drive the AI agenda presents real risks.

Survey respondents were asked whether they felt robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) would have a constructive or a destructive effect on several market segments. Their responses were ranked from 1 (AI adoption would result in the destruction of jobs and processes) to 5 (AI would bring a significant increase in the industry's value and efficiency). Across industry sectors, responses were positive, averaging 3.8 on that scale. They were higher in more technology-dependent industries, such as information technology and communications (ITC), logistics, and manufacturing. Tellingly, respondents were even more inclined to see positive benefits from AI for their own industry: most industry participants ranked the impact of AI on their own sector higher than the average.

Asia-based senior executives at global companies believe that the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics on their business performance in Asia will be profound and positive--and will be felt sooner than we may think. Outside of global robotics industry leaders Korea and Japan, most of Asia currently lacks the depth of technical skills and R&D facilities needed to keep pace with AI development. However, China, India, and other large Asian economies generate a copious amount of data, a tremendous "natural resource" that is critical to pushing AI's capabilities forward. Ironically, given the commonly held view that AI will be responsible for disintermediation of jobs at all levels, it is Asia's massive human capital dividend--the billions of constantly Internet-connected workers and consumers--that will propel AI development in the region farther and faster. MIT Technology Review's International Markets division surveyed more than 60 Asia-based senior executives to gather perspective on the impact of AI and robotics on Asia's business landscape.