Kai-Fu Lee: How AI teaches us what it means to be human

07/20/22 • 32 min

In 2017, leading AI expert Kai-Fu Lee shared a dire prediction: half of all jobs – both blue collar and white collar – could be automated within ten years, replacing the workforce with solutions built on artificial intelligence. Brad and Kai-Fu discuss what this coming change means for national economies and for people who care about their work. Kai-Fu lays out practical steps policy makers can take today to prepare, the three areas he believes human intelligence will continue to lead, and why he remains an AI optimist.

Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has driven innovation in AI research and development for over three decades. He is the Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and President of Sinovation Venture’s Artificial Intelligence Institute. Prior to founding Sinovation in 2009, Dr. Lee was the President of Google China, and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. In the field of AI, Dr. Lee built one of the first game playing programs to defeat a world champion, as well as the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system. His bestselling book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order discusses US-China co-leadership in the age of AI, as well as the greater societal impacts wrought by the AI technology revolution. His new co-authored book AI 2041 explores how AI will change our world over the next 20 years.

Click here for the episode transcript.

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Previous Episode

Thomas Friedman: It's not what we know, but how well we listen

Thomas Friedman believes if you want to understand human nature, live with people in extreme situations. And if you want to know the future, hang around people inventing it. As a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Thomas Friedman has spent a career reporting from a civil war in Beirut, observing some of the world’s leading companies from the inside, and discovering that the key to understanding globalization is studying the only system that mirrors it in complexity – nature. In this episode Brad and Thomas explore how our biggest challenges in society are tied to the environment and the economy, and how the key to our future hinges not on what we know, but on how well we listen.

Thomas Friedman is an internationally renowned author, reporter, and columnist. He is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes—two for international reporting from the Middle East and a third for his columns written about 9/11. He started his journalism career with United Press International in 1978. After serving as a Beirut reporter for UPI for two years, Friedman was hired by the New York Times in 1981, where he served as the Beirut bureau chief, Jerusalem bureau chief, chief diplomatic correspondent, international economics correspondent and, since 1995, its foreign affairs columnist. He is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers — From Beirut to Jerusalem; The Lexus and the Olive Tree; Longitudes and Attitudes; The World Is Flat; Hot, Flat, and Crowded; That Used to Be Us (with Michael Mandelbaum); and, most recently, Thank You For Being Late.

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Next Episode

Mathias Döpfner: Can democracy survive without independent journalism?

Why does the head of a global media powerhouse still give his occupation as “journalist?” Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer SE, is driven by deep convictions about journalism’s role in safeguarding democracy – a perspective forged in his youth after viewing the American miniseries Holocaust.

In this episode, Brad and Mathias dive into the worrying trends developing in democracies around the world and how technology can reduce – or amplify – the danger. They discuss how new business models can strengthen digital journalism, their shared belief in the power of truth, and what he believes is the one precondition for great quality journalism.

Dr. Mathias Döpfner is the CEO of Axel Springer SE, the largest publishing house in Europe. He started his career as a journalist in 1982 and has been with the company since 1998, initially as editor-in-chief of Axel Springer’s flagship daily newspaper, Die Welt (The World). Döpfner became a member of the Executive Board in 2000 and has been CEO since January 2002. Since Döpfner became CEO, Axel Springer’s revenues from its digital initiatives have increased twenty-fold, and its worldwide digital audience expanded to more than 400 million users. An active public speaker, Döpfner is engaged in efforts to preserve freedom and the free press for democratic societies. He is also a member of the board of directors of Netflix and Warner Music.

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