简体中文
In one Chinese province, artificial intelligence (AI) appears to be
creating abundant jobs for humans, instead of stealing them, but only
for those in the know.
A senior official in Zhejiang Province, home to Alibaba, said Monday
that the province aims to hire more than 110,000 AI professionals in the
next five years.
Among them will be 50 world-leading AI experts, 500 scientific
entrepreneurs, and 1,000 development and research talent, said Yao
Zhiwen, deputy head of the organization department of the Communist
Party of China, Zhejiang provincial committee.
He said the provincial government would provide financial support to
entrepreneurs in AI and encourage universities to enroll more graduate
students on the subjects.
Zhejiang will set up a 1-billion-yuan (147 million U.S. dollars)
development fund and a 50-million-yuan investment fund to support AI
professionals and startups, Yao said.
China is in the midst of an AI boom with governments, research
institutes, tech firms, and entrepreneurs racing to be involved, betting
on the discipline to take the lead in economic growth and social
development.
Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu -- the top three Chinese tech firms -- are all investing heavily in AI research.
AI professionals are sought after across the country, but no other
local government has set such ambitious goals and offered such lucrative
incentives.
The province plans to build an AI industry worth 50 billion yuan in
three years. The industry clusters will be based in the provincial
capital of Hangzhou and economic powerhouse of Ningbo.
The official was speaking at a global AI forum, themed "the future is now," in Hangzhou Monday.
The conference was attended by both Chinese and foreign participants
including Turing Award Winner Cornell University Computer Science
Professor John Hopcroft and Yuval Noah Harari, author of the 2015 book
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.
Harari told the forum audience that robots would outperform humans in
many jobs and that we might no longer need taxis drivers or truck
drivers, among others, in the future.
Many jobs will be lost that we have to keep learning new things to
adapt to a changing world, he said. After 2040, the thing that remains
unchanged is change itself.
