FROM LAB TO LIFE

Hogue-Spears offers an in-depth exploration of China’s artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Western narratives surrounding China’s AI capabilities tend to fall into two camps. The first is alarmist, pointing to widespread data harvesting and privacy concerns, and the second dismisses Chinese capabilities as the “intellectual property theft” of American innovations. The problem with both narratives, per this book, is that they ignore a more fundamental question about how China’s system “actually operates.” In this groundbreaking work, Hogue-Spears offers readers a nuanced, tech-savvy analysis of an often misunderstood yet globally dominant AI system. A central component of the book’s argument is that Chinese coders honed their AI capabilities years before their American counterparts did. The author highlights, for example, that China’s largest search engine, Baidu, built infrastructure for AI in 2012 as it “shaped what hundreds of millions of people saw, trusted, and clicked, long before anyone called the system AI.” Government regulation in China has a strong effect on Baidu’s infrastructure; the search engine carefully complied with myriad guidelines that shaped the output of searches. Hogue-Spears asserts that one must understand the particularities of these regulations to truly understand Chinese AI today, which he describes as a “governed AI ecosystem.” These guidelines, per the book’s astute overview, serve as a force that “sets the conditions for market access” and guides “a path to users.” This well-researched book leans heavily on Hogue-Spears’s familiarity with Chinese-language regulatory texts; he’s a former Amazon Web Services employee who coordinated with Chinese government auditors on cloud-computing compliance. He also makes a convincing case that Western misunderstandings about Chinese AI have led to flawed policies and decisions. The book’s coverage of technological intricacies and bureaucratic policies doesn’t always make for an accessible read for laypeople, but this is nevertheless an important volume that convincingly dispels popular myths about its topic.

A learned, albeit highly technical, overview of the world’s second-largest AI ecosystem.