Daily Report: An Industry’s Center of Influence Shifts

Sometimes a shift in power happens so subtly that you don’t even notice it is occurring. Take the increasingly important field of artificial intelligence.

For all the talk of autonomous vehicles and smart home appliances in Silicon Valley, some of the most innovative work in artificial intelligence is being done far away, in China.

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Beijing is supporting A.I. research with vast sums of money and is helping to move those innovations into China’s private sector, Paul Mozur and John Markoff write. And China is spending more just as the United States appears to be ready to pull back on such investing. The Trump administration recently released a proposed budget that would drastically cut back on many of the federal programs that have traditionally funded artificial intelligence research.

“China’s ambitions mingle the most far-out sci-fi ideas with the needs of an authoritarian state: Philip K. Dick meets George Orwell,” Paul and John write. “There are plans to use it to predict crimes, lend money, track people on the country’s ubiquitous closed-circuit cameras, alleviate traffic jams, create self-guided missiles and censor the internet.”

What’s more, entrepreneurs from other countries who might have made their way to Silicon Valley in years past now consider China a legitimate option for their work.

It may be that the United States is turning inward at exactly the wrong moment to capture the technology industry’s next big breakthrough.

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