AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

A WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • “This inspired collaboration between a pioneering technologist and a visionary creator 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 go back and forth 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, then again, 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 want to wake up—both to AI’s radiant pathways and its existential perils for life as we understand it.

In this provocative, utterly original work, Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China and bestselling creator of AI Superpowers, teams up with celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan to believe our world in 2041 and how it’s going to 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—even as reminding readers that, in the end, humankind remains the creator of its destiny.