AI super-powers: China, Silicon Valley and the new world order

The Trump–Xi trade war over semi-conductors is just one manifestation of the trepidation about who holds tech supremacy: the US or China. Does the future lie in Silicon Valley, the epitome of American entrepreneurship and home to the mission-oriented founders who have connected us and organized the world's information? Or with the growing Chinese tech behemoths, which we presume are propped up by the state? The two countries’ relative artificial intelligence (AI) capacity is of particular interest in answering this question. Anxiety over the advance of AI is rife as, even in the hands of American engineers, it sparks deep-seated worry about the social dislocations it could cause in the form of widespread…