Artificial intelligence, is there a big competitive pressure in the future?

Artificial intelligence is the general trend of the future. Machine translation, intelligent control, expert system, robotics, language and image understanding, gene programming robot factory, automatic programming, aerospace application, huge information processing, storage and management, performing complex or large-scale tasks that cannot be performed by combined organisms, etc. There will be competitive pressure, which just reflects the popularity of artificial intelligence, so it is good to learn artificial intelligence. Although not everyone can do these things, there are many talents for our country and even the world, so there will definitely be competitive pressure. We must keep learning and explore new knowledge.

Expansion and supplement:

For China, the development of artificial intelligence is a historic strategic opportunity, which is crucial to alleviate the pressure of population aging in the future, meet the challenge of sustainable development and promote the transformation and upgrading of economic structure.

Although "artificial intelligence" (AI) has become a well-known concept, the definition of artificial intelligence has not yet reached a universal understanding. The traditional development idea of artificial intelligence is to study how human beings produce intelligence, and then let machines learn human thinking and behavior. John mccarthy, who put forward the concept of modern artificial intelligence, believes that machines don't necessarily need to think like human beings to acquire intelligence, and the key point is to let machines solve problems that human brains can solve.

The fourth industrial revolution is coming, and artificial intelligence has gradually entered reality from science fiction. Since 1956 first put forward the concept of artificial intelligence, the development of artificial intelligence has experienced ups and downs. With the breakthrough of core algorithms, the rapid improvement of computing power, and the support of massive Internet data, artificial intelligence finally ushered in a qualitative leap in the second decade of 2 1 century and became the focus of science and technology attracting worldwide attention. Since AIphaGo defeated Li Shishi on 20 16, the global excitement and worries about the development of artificial intelligence are inevitably intertwined.

Even so, countries all over the world have realized that artificial intelligence is the key stage of competition among countries in the future, so they began to deploy artificial intelligence development strategies in order to occupy the historical high point of a new round of scientific and technological revolution. For China, the development of artificial intelligence is a historic strategic opportunity, which is crucial to alleviate the pressure of population aging in the future, meet the challenge of sustainable development and promote the transformation and upgrading of economic structure.

This paper describes the development of artificial intelligence in China from the aspects of scientific and technological output and talent input, industrial development and market application, development strategy and policy environment.

Scientific and technological output and talent input

1. Paper output: The total number of artificial intelligence papers and the number of highly cited papers in China ranks first in the world. China's global share of papers in the field of artificial intelligence rose from 4.26% in 1997 to 27.68% in 20 17, far ahead of other countries. Colleges and universities are the absolute main force in the output of artificial intelligence papers. Among the top 100 universities in the world, 87 are universities. The output of artificial intelligence papers from top universities in China is outstanding all over the world. Moreover, China's highly cited papers show a rapid growth trend, surpassing the United States to become the first in the world in 20 13 years. However, in the global enterprise paper output ranking, only State Grid Corporation ranks among the top 20 in the world. From the perspective of discipline distribution, computer science, engineering and automatic control system are the disciplines with the largest distribution of artificial intelligence papers. The influence of international cooperation on the output of artificial intelligence papers is very obvious. The proportion of high-level papers published in China through international cooperation is as high as 42.64%.

2. Patent application: The number of patents in China is slightly ahead of that in the United States and Japan, and the performance of State Grid is outstanding. China has become the country with the largest number of artificial intelligence patents in the world, slightly ahead of the United States and Japan, which account for 74% of the total patents in the world. Global patent applications mainly focus on the subdivision directions such as speech recognition, image recognition, robotics and machine learning. Among the top 30 institutions in China with artificial intelligence patents, the performance of scientific research institutes is equivalent to that of universities and enterprises, and their technological inventions account for 52% and 48% respectively. The performance of major patentees in enterprises varies greatly. In particular, the artificial intelligence related technologies of China State Grid have developed rapidly in the past five years, and the number of patented technologies in China is much higher than that of other patentees, ranking fourth among global enterprises. Patent technology in China is concentrated in the fields of data processing system and digital information transmission, among which patents related to image processing and analysis account for 16% of the total number of inventions. Power engineering has also become an important field of artificial intelligence patent layout in China.

3. Talent input: The total number of artificial intelligence talents in China ranks second in the world, but the proportion of outstanding talents is low. By 20 17, the number of artificial intelligence talents in China will reach 18232, accounting for 8.9% of the world total, second only to the United States (13.9%). Universities and scientific research institutions are the main carriers of artificial intelligence talents, and Tsinghua University and Chinese Academy of Sciences have become the largest institutions to invest in artificial intelligence talents in the world. However, according to the high H factor (also known as the H index, which is used to evaluate the scientific research achievements of scientists), there are only 977 outstanding talents in China, which is less than one-fifth of that in the United States and ranks sixth in the world. The amount of talents invested by enterprises is relatively small. Enterprises with high-intensity talents are concentrated in the United States, and only one enterprise in China has entered the top 20 in the world. China's artificial intelligence talents are concentrated in the east and the middle, but some western cities such as Xi and Chengdu are also outstanding. International artificial intelligence talents are concentrated in the fields of machine learning, data mining and pattern recognition, while the research fields of artificial intelligence talents in China are scattered.

Industrial development and market application

1. Enterprise scale: China has the second largest number of artificial intelligence enterprises in the world, and Beijing is the most concentrated city in the world. By the end of 2065438+June 2008, the total number of artificial intelligence enterprises monitored by * * * in the world reached 4925, of which the number of artificial intelligence enterprises in the United States was 2028, ranking first in the world. The total number of artificial intelligence enterprises in China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) is 1 01,ranking second in the world, followed by Britain, Canada and India (Figure1);

In terms of city size (Figure 2), among the top 20 cities in terms of the number of artificial intelligence enterprises in the world, the United States accounts for 9, China accounts for 4, Canada accounts for 3, and Britain, Germany, France and Israel each account for 1 city. Among them, Beijing has become the city with the largest number of artificial intelligence enterprises in the world, followed by San Francisco and London. The number of artificial intelligence enterprises in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hangzhou has also entered the top 20 in the world.

From the time of establishment (Figure 3), the emergence of artificial intelligence start-ups in China was concentrated in 20 12-20 16, reaching a peak in 20 15, with 228 new start-ups. Since 20 16, the growth rate of start-ups has slowed down.

The average age of artificial intelligence enterprises in China is 5.5 years. Among them, there are many start-ups in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin, and the average age of enterprises is lower than the national average, and the average age is less than 5.5 years old. The old industrial robots and automation enterprises in Shandong and Liaoning have undergone many transformations, and the enterprises are relatively old.

The application technology of artificial intelligence mainly includes speech technology (including speech recognition, speech synthesis, etc. ), visual technology (including biometrics, image recognition, video recognition, etc. ) and natural language processing technology (including machine translation, text mining, sentiment analysis, etc. ). Considering the basic hardware, the application technology distribution of artificial intelligence enterprises at home and abroad is shown in Figure 4. Compared with foreign countries, the application technology of artificial intelligence enterprises in China focuses more on vision and voice, while the proportion of basic hardware is smaller.

Industrial applications of artificial intelligence include intelligent robots, intelligent driving, unmanned aerial vehicles, AR/VR, big data and data services, and various vertical applications (defined as "AI+" in this paper). The industrial application distribution of artificial intelligence enterprises at home and abroad is shown in Figure 5. It can be seen that compared with foreign countries, domestic enterprises pay more attention to the market of terminal products such as intelligent robots, drones and intelligent driving, while foreign enterprises pay more attention to the application of AI in various vertical industries.

2. Venture capital: China has become the country with the largest investment and financing scale of artificial intelligence in the world. Since 20 13, the investment and financing scale of artificial intelligence industry in the world and China has been on the rise (Figure 6). In 20 17, the total investment and financing scale of global artificial intelligence reached $39.5 billion, and there were 1208 financing events, among which the total investment and financing scale of China reached $277 1 100 million, and there were 369 financing events. The total financing of AI enterprises in China accounts for 70% of the global financing, and the number of financing transactions reaches 3 1%.

According to the global investment and financing data from 20 13 to the first quarter of 20 18, China has surpassed the United States to become the most "gold-sucking" country in the world in terms of artificial intelligence financing scale, but the United States is still in the leading position in the world in terms of investment and financing quantity.

Development strategy and policy environment

1. International comparison: Artificial intelligence strategies and policies in different countries have their own emphases. Since 20 13, the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Japan and China have all introduced artificial intelligence strategies and policies. The strategies of artificial intelligence in different countries have different emphases, and the United States attaches importance to the influence of artificial intelligence on economic development, scientific and technological leadership and national security; EU countries are concerned about the ethical risks such as safety, privacy and dignity brought by artificial intelligence. Japan hopes that artificial intelligence will promote the construction of its super-intelligent society; China's artificial intelligence policy focuses on realizing the industrialization in the field of artificial intelligence and helping China's strategy of making a strong country. There are also great differences in R&D priorities and key application areas of national policies.

2. National policies: from the Internet of Things to big data to artificial intelligence. From 2009 to now, the evolution of China's artificial intelligence policy can be divided into five stages, and its core keywords are constantly changing, reflecting the different development priorities of each stage.

At the national level, the policy focuses on basic scientific research such as Internet of Things, information security and databases in the early stage, and big data and infrastructure in the middle stage. After 20 17, artificial intelligence has become the core theme, and intellectual property protection has also become an important theme. On the whole, China's artificial intelligence policy mainly focuses on the following six aspects: made in China, driven by innovation, Internet of Things, internet plus, big data, and scientific research and development.

3. Local policies: In response to national strategies, local policies have different themes. Local governments actively responded to the national artificial intelligence development strategy, in which "Made in China 2025" is at the core of the artificial intelligence policy application network and plays a programmatic role in the formulation of local artificial intelligence policies. Judging from the number of policy releases, the active areas of artificial intelligence development in China are mainly concentrated in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao. The policy themes of different provinces are also very different. For example, Jiangsu Province pays attention to R&D basic fields such as infrastructure, Internet of Things and cloud computing, Guangdong Province pays attention to artificial intelligence applications such as manufacturing and robots, and Fujian Province pays attention to Internet of Things, big data, innovation platforms and intellectual property rights. Local policies are closely related to local development conditions.

Comprehensive impact on society

With the full development of artificial intelligence and the improvement of labor productivity and productivity level, people's life experience will be more colorful, people will be liberated from manual labor and even routine mental labor, and more people will participate in creative activities, so that human beings and society will be more fully developed. At present, the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology is constantly changing the development mode of retail, agriculture, logistics, education, medical care, finance, commerce and other fields, and reconstructing production, distribution, exchange and consumption. According to IDC data, in the next five years, the application of artificial intelligence technology in many industries will greatly improve the operational efficiency of these industries. The specific improvement efficiency is 82% in the education industry, 765,438+0% in the retail industry, 64% in the manufacturing industry and 58% in the financial industry.

1. The influence of artificial intelligence on education and employment. The ultimate goal of developing artificial intelligence is not to replace human beings, but to help them become smarter, and education will play a key role in this process. Artificial intelligence technology improves the productivity in economic activities, and makes people gradually pull away from mechanical repetitive or dangerous labor, thus increasing leisure time such as thinking and appreciation, and paying more attention to the potential development and promotion of innovation ability, thinking ability, aesthetics and imagination.

At present, the application of artificial intelligence in education mainly focuses on the following aspects: adaptive (personalized) learning, virtual tutor, educational robot, science and technology education based on programming and robot, and scene education based on virtual reality/augmented reality. Learning in a way that suits you can not only improve efficiency, but also keep your interest in learning longer.

The significance of developing artificial intelligence in the field of education is not to replace teachers, but to help teachers make teaching more efficient and interesting. In addition, in the education system influenced by artificial intelligence technology, the requirements for talents' information input and output ability and autonomous learning ability have suddenly increased, and the cultivation of innovative ability has also become an important direction.

With the development of science and technology, it gradually replaces human beings to engage in the most tedious and repetitive work or manual labor, which brings benefits to people and unprecedented challenges. Today, more and more people are worried that their jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence technology, or they can only survive in the "cracks" left by artificial intelligence. Some experts have estimated the probability that jobs in China will be replaced by artificial intelligence. The results show that in the next 20 years, about 76% of the total employed population will be impacted by artificial intelligence technology, and if only the non-agricultural population is considered, this proportion will be 65%. But at the same time, the creative effect of artificial intelligence technology on employment has also appeared. According to the survey, at present, the scale of artificial intelligence team in China Kechuang Company has expanded by 20% on average, and this demand will increase. In addition, experts from the Education Examination Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that the demand for talents in the AI field in China may increase to 5 million in the next few years.

It can be judged that under the background of artificial intelligence reshaping industrial structure and consumer demand, some jobs will eventually be eliminated by history, but a series of new jobs will also be hatched with artificial intelligence technology. On the other hand, the new man-machine relationship is being built, and the non-programmed cognitive work will become more and more irreplaceable, which puts forward higher requirements for people's innovation, thinking and imagination.

Mechanization and intelligence are shaping a new employment pattern, but we should also be alert to the possible derivative problems under the new pattern, such as the gap between the rich and the poor caused by the rising unemployment rate and social stability. The "impact" brought by artificial intelligence is persistent, and so are the multiple impacts on education and employment. Therefore, we must actively explore the education and employment mechanism that matches and adapts to the technological revolution.

2. The impact of artificial intelligence on privacy and security. Today, in many life consumption scenarios, people's demand for personalized experience is growing, and personalized and scene-based services have gradually become the main direction of artificial intelligence-driven innovation. Under the background of socialized information acquisition and time fragmentation, service providers strive to establish more flexible and convenient consumption scenarios and bring people a more friendly user experience. At the same time, with the development and maturity of speech recognition, face recognition and machine learning algorithms, enterprises can truly understand customers by analyzing customer portraits, and further enhance customers' sense of attention and satisfaction with accurate and differentiated services. However, it contains great commercial value, but it also challenges the existing legal order and public safety.

The virtuality of cyberspace makes it easier for personal data to be collected and shared, which greatly facilitates the storage, analysis and transaction process of information such as identity information number, health status, credit record and location activity trace. At the same time, it is difficult for people to track the way and extent of personal data privacy disclosure. For example, in the intelligent medical care supported by artificial intelligence technology, how to define the ownership of patients' electronic medical records and private data, and how to standardize the authority restrictions of hospitals to obtain and use private data. Another example is the copyright issue of works generated by artificial intelligence technology. The open industrial ecology makes it difficult for regulators to determine the object of supervision, and also makes the legal boundary more and more blurred.

The wide application of artificial intelligence has changed the trend of "man-machine relationship", and man-machine interaction is frequent, which can be said to form a new embedded relationship. The boundary between time and space is broken, and virtual and reality are switched at will. The unpredictability and irreversibility of this trend is likely to lead to a series of potential risks. Different from the "information leakage" that people easily ignore, artificial intelligence technology may also be purposefully used by a few people with ulterior motives for criminal acts such as fraud. For example, personal information obtained through improper means forms a "data portrait" and impersonates acquaintances through social software for fraud. Another example is to use artificial intelligence technology to learn and simulate, generate information including images, videos, audio and biometric features, and break through the security barrier. Last year, it was reported that the boot function of Apple's new mobile phone was cracked, which is such an example. From the perspective of potential risks, drones, unmanned vehicles, intelligent robots and so on. It is possible to be controlled by illegal invasion, cause property damage or be used for criminal purposes.

3. The impact of artificial intelligence on social equity. With the rapid development and application of artificial intelligence, a series of value problems gradually emerge in front of people. At present, there are a large number of people who can't surf the Internet, because of objective conditions, they can't use the Internet and don't want to get in touch with it. They have been defined as "marginal people" in the era of artificial intelligence, which has higher requirements for people's education level and information flow. The more advanced the artificial intelligence technology is, the deeper the information gap will be, and then it will evolve into a service gap and a welfare gap. In the era of artificial intelligence, it will be more and more difficult for "marginal people" to enjoy convenient intelligent information services and obtain scarce service resources.

This article is transferred from China Economic Report, No.20 10, China Science and Technology Policy Research Center, Tsinghua University.