Divided We Fail
WIRED|November 2018

Democracy's On The Ropes. Social Media May Be To Blame. And Artificial Intelligence Could Be The Ultimate Authoritarian Tool. But One Thing's For Sure: We Should Do Everything We Can To Avoid A New Technological Cold War With China.

Nicholas Thompson & Ian Bremmer
Divided We Fail

IN THE SPRING of 2016, an artificial intelligence system called AlphaGo defeated a world champion Go player in a match at the Four Seasons hotel in Seoul. In the US, this momentous news required some unpacking. Most Americans were unfamiliar with Go, an ancient Asian game that involves placing black and white stones on a wooden board. And the technology that had emerged victorious was even more foreign: a form of AI called machine learning, which uses large data sets to train a computer to recognize patterns and make its own strategic choices.

Still, the gist of the story was familiar enough. Computers had already mastered checkers and chess; now they had learned to dominate a still more complex game. Geeks cared, but most people didn’t. In the White House, Terah Lyons, one of Barack Obama’s science and technology policy advisers, remembers her team cheering on the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Executive Building. “We saw it as a win for technology,” she says. “The next day the rest of the White House forgot about it.”

In China, by contrast, 280 million people watched AlphaGo win. There, what really mattered was that a machine owned by a California company, Alphabet, the parent of Google, had conquered a game invented more than 2,500 years ago in Asia. Americans don’t even play Go. And yet they had somehow figured out how to vanquish it? Kai-Fu Lee, a pioneer in the field of AI, remembers being asked to comment on the match by nearly every major television station in the country. Until then, he had been quietly investing in Chinese AI companies. But when he saw the attention, he started broadcasting his venture fund’s artificial intelligence investment strategy. “We said, OK, after this match, the whole country is going to know about AI,” he recalls. “So we went big.”

This story is from the November 2018 edition of WIRED.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.

This story is from the November 2018 edition of WIRED.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.

MORE STORIES FROM WIREDView All
IN DEFENSE OF JAVASCRIPT
WIRED

IN DEFENSE OF JAVASCRIPT

Mock it all you want-but it runs the world. Possibly even literally.

time-read
5 mins  |
March - April 2024
EVERY WOMAN IS AN ISLAND
WIRED

EVERY WOMAN IS AN ISLAND

Matriarchy, money, and a modern mariner named Marina.

time-read
5 mins  |
March - April 2024
THE PROVINCE OF ALL MANKIND
WIRED

THE PROVINCE OF ALL MANKIND

TWO NATIONS. A HORRIBLE ACCIDENT. AND THE URGENT NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE LAWS OF SPACE RIGHT NOW.

time-read
10+ mins  |
March - April 2024
LOVE, DEMENTIA AND ROBOTICS
WIRED

LOVE, DEMENTIA AND ROBOTICS

When my parents got sick, I turned to a NEW GENERATION of roboticists and their GLOWING, TALKING, WARMHEARTED creations.

time-read
10+ mins  |
March - April 2024
DEATH OF A PRESIDENT
WIRED

DEATH OF A PRESIDENT

Three decades after a devastating nuclear war between the US and China, a divided America faces a new threat to its very DNA. An excerpt from 2054: A Novel.

time-read
10+ mins  |
March - April 2024
TAIL AS OLD AS TIME
WIRED

TAIL AS OLD AS TIME

Was Bobi the world's longest-lived dogor just another casualty of Big Kibble?

time-read
5 mins  |
March - April 2024
THE Algorithmic Authenticity OF Shou Zi Chew
WIRED

THE Algorithmic Authenticity OF Shou Zi Chew

The CEO of the world's most influential social media company likes tacos, Sheryl Crow, and Diablo IV. Is he for real-ora really good politician?

time-read
10+ mins  |
March - April 2024
The Revolutionary Absurdity of Boots Riley
WIRED

The Revolutionary Absurdity of Boots Riley

The scene is straight out of Boots Riley's madcap moviemaking handbook

time-read
10+ mins  |
September 2023
A. I. Goes to War
WIRED

A. I. Goes to War

Ships without crews. Autonomous drone swarms. A small U.S. Navy task force is using off-the-shelf robotics and Artificial Intelligence to prepare for the next great conflict at sea

time-read
10+ mins  |
September 2023
The Fractal Immortality of Grimes
WIRED

The Fractal Immortality of Grimes

I thought my interview with Grimes-the mysterious techno artist, fan of all nerddom, and the deepest of insiders in Elon Musk's world-would be one-on-one. Instead it wound up as a roundtable discussion. Turns out there are multiple personas embedded in the surprisingly haimish human who sat under a tree with me and spent the waning hours of an afternoon in conversation. There was Claire Boucher, the given name of a Vancouver kid obsessed with video games and devoted to provoking adults with misbehavior and the embrace of taboo subjects. There was Grimes, the self-invented, scrappy DIY musician and provocateur who weaves sci-fi into her work and released what Pitchfork judged to be the second-best song of the 2010s. And there was her preferred nomenclature, "c," invoking the speed of light

time-read
10+ mins  |
September 2023