Vivian Wang

You know, in America, when people talk about AI, there's this whole Doomer conversation.

A lot of people are really nervous about it, you know, either taking their job or taking over the entire world.

And that conversation is just a lot quieter in China.

Yeah, China is really focused on how AI can be useful to them now.

And that comes in part because China has a lot of really deep structural issues that without AI, I think they really don't have a way to solve.

So for example, the population and the workforce are aging really quickly.

And how do you solve that if young people don't want to have children?

Well, maybe using AI to make your factories more efficient.

Another problem is huge inequities between access to health care in rural and urban areas.

If you don't have enough doctors, how do you solve that?

Maybe AI doctors are the answer.

I think so, yeah.

The Chinese government historically has always been quite optimistic about technology.

I mean, if you look at the past few decades, technology has been a big part of what has powered China's amazing economic rise.

And so I think they see AI as basically the latest iteration of some kind of technology that is going to help them on this global ascent and is going to solve these problems that they have.

It was early in Xi Jinping's tenure as leader of China, and he was giving a speech to a gathering of some of China's top engineers and scientists.

And he had gotten a bunch of reports from the scientists ahead of time, kind of giving him suggestions on what they thought China's next direction in science should be.

And Xi gets up there and he gives a speech and he says, oh, thank you so much for all of your suggestions.

I read them all.

And I was really interested in this one report that said intelligent robots are going to be a really big deal going forward.