How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years? A WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON POST AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • This inspired collaboration
between a pioneering technologist and a visionary writer of science fiction offers bold and
urgent insights.”—Yann LeCun winner of the Turing Award chief AI scientist Facebook
Amazingly entertaining . . . Lee and Chen take us on an immersive trip through the future. . .
. Eye-opening.”—Mark Cuban AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century.
Within two decades aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate
unprecedented wealth revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis and
create brand-new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work
however AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order.
Meanwhile AI will bring new risks in the form of autonomous weapons and smart technology that
inherits human bias. AI is at a tipping point and people need to wake up—both to AI’s radiant
pathways and its existential perils for life as we know it. In this provocative utterly
original work Kai-Fu Lee the former president of Google China and bestselling author of AI
Superpowers teams up with celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan to imagine our world in 2041 and how
it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping short stories they introduce readers to an array of
eye-opening 2041 settings such as: • In San Francisco the job reallocation” industry emerges
as deep learning AI causes widespread job displacement • In Tokyo a music fan is swept up in
an immersive form of celebrity worship based on virtual reality and mixed reality • In Mumbai
a teenage girl rebels when AI’s crunching of big data gets in the way of romance • In Seoul
virtual companions with perfected natural language processing (NLP) skills offer orphaned twins
new ways to connect • In Munich a rogue scientist draws on quantum computing computer vision
and other AI technologies in a revenge plot that imperils the world By gazing toward a
not-so-distant horizon AI 2041 offers urgent insights into our collective future—while
reminding readers that ultimately humankind remains the author of its destiny.
