Kai Fu Lee’s Vision of the Future of 2041

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has spent more than three decades at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence research, development, and investment in both the US and China. He is now managing a $3 billion Sinovation Ventures fund.

Previously, Dr. Lee was the president of Google China and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence Council at the World Economic Forum, he has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon.

He is a New York Times best-selling author and his latest book, co-authored with award-winning science-fiction writer Chen Quifan, is called AI2041: Ten Visions for Our Future. It presents a roadmap to educate and explore the opportunities and challenges presented by AI over the coming decades.

Twenty years if enough for big changes to occur but not so much where it would be fanciful to predict.

Kai-fu Lee says the biggest things to happen was in 2014 when computers beat humans in vision recognition. In 2020, the big AI achievement is when AI starting beating humans in reading comprehension. Kau Fu Lee thinks the next seven years will have amazing achievements growing from superior reading comprehension and natural language.

Computer vision has four AI unicorn startups which range from $5-20 billion in valuation.

Kai-Fu’s book is coming out Sept 14, 2021.

There are ten stories with making predictions about 2041.

Age of Plentitude
* Abundance of automated labor, materials and energy. Robots for automation and abundant labor. Materials revolution causing positive deflation. Distributed energy from abundant solar and batteries.

* AI’s could measure positive contribution and reward spiritual tokens.

Another story is about advanced deep fakes.

He has invested into a real company making automated forklifts.
Another company has made soft robotic hand. The robot hand can pick up eggs.

AI 2041 – Ten Visions for Our Future
In this groundbreaking blend of imaginative storytelling and scientific forecasting, the pioneering AI expert and a leading writer of speculative fiction join forces to answer an imperative question: How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years?

His book presents a roadmap to educate and explore the opportunities and challenges presented by AI over the coming decades.

He worries about the slaughterbot scenario.

SOURCES- AI2041, Peter Diamandis, Kai-Fu Lee
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

15 thoughts on “Kai Fu Lee’s Vision of the Future of 2041”

  1. Revolutionary change often happens when evolutionary change has been repressed until pressure builds to the point that it can no longer be resisted by those who benefit from the old order.

    Look for entrenched stakeholders who block or slow progress that might weaken their power and/or income, to identify areas ripe for revolution: Educators, GP doctors and diagnosticians, insurance companies, big hierarchical corporations, govt bureacrats…

    AI will add a lot more pressure behind information dams, and eventually – legally or illegally (e.g. Napster) – the people they've sought to keep under their control will start leaking around them.

  2. Drugs and energy generation are used in almost all countries these days. Drugs especially are probably MORE important to someone in a poor nation because they don't have the overall social hygiene etc. to avoid diseases in other ways.

  3. Sounds like one of those respected academics coming out of mainland China with the air of a man of the two worlds who also does spying for China on the side.

  4. that's interesting. a lot of trans-discipline work doesn't happen with CS departments… medical and high energy physics are a natural .. but art, construction, and police work…

  5. a lot of computational intense areas not getting a lot of attention that could benefit:
    – forensic analysis
    – animation optimization
    – construction process management…
    etc
    many areas that don't embrace an automation culture due to artsiness, traditional values, criticality of the data, etc..
    Lots of opportunities to expand beyond money, medical, and modeling…

  6. Well, a better photo and video tagger won't change our lives that much.

    For me the biggest impact, more than infiltrating in our daily lives , which has already happened, will come from new added capabilities, like predicting the folding of a new molecule and creating custom substances and genetic or RNA treatments for any disease in minutes.

    Robots doing non previously possible things like full self driving cars and drones will be another. Or doing home chores an helping take care of the old and infirm.

    My wish is we soon develop AI smart enough to take care of the growing elderly population, or to create treatments to stop the ravages of old age altogether. That's the kind of revolution we actually need.

  7. and likely very limited in access to the public. Top institutions, military, hush-hush programs.. probably very pedestrian items and very-much limited 'trickle down' effects.

  8. can you say 'jaded'?
    everything is incremental as you live it. Cell phones, internet, test tube baby, genome mapping… these are truly revolutionary.
    It will be the peoples' acceptance of the possibilities that will be limiting, ordinary, and baby-steps. But when we get instant-drug discoveries due to small-molecule analysis, new cheaper power capacities due to accelerating fusion energy yodeling, financial systems and encryption, efficiencies in all things big business… etc., life will be way more intense and option-filled – but only to those embrace it…

  9. They are superior at recognizing shapes and in velocity doing so, but not on interpreting images.

    Also, for beating a merely visual captcha, you'd need a NN trained on beating it, which is expensive to make, specially if made only to be used by a spam bot.

  10. I wish that I could believe that the changes to people's lives will be 'revolutionary' rather than 'evolutionary', but…
    If anything revolutionary does happen it will be because AI is given serious decision-making power – unlikely, in the G7 countries.
    It will be evolutionary because it will be under-the-hood and behind-the-scenes – though perhaps truly remarkable when you step back. As an example, it was truly remarkable when they introduced a sanitary system to London in the mid-1800s – but did people change their habits, pivot to new dreams and goals, double their wealth and/or skills, realize new ambitions and undertake paths they never imagined -no. They just dumped better and healthier.
    Incremental. GDP increase maintaining. Science/ engineering-improving. 2041AI – just a nice thing.

  11. "Kai-fu Lee says the biggest things to happen was in 2014 when computers beat humans in vision recognition."

    Captchas tell me that this has not actually happened, as a practical matter, though I suppose the very highest end computers might have average people beat.

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