Where friends Ken Liu and Hao Jingfang differ and converge on artificial intelligence

Friends who stay together can sometimes differ on serious grounds like how artificial intelligence (AI) will shape the future, if the conversation between award winning science-fiction writers Ken Liu and Hao Jingfang at the Singapore Writers Festival on Nov 9 is anything to go by.

- Shawn Hoo

At the Victoria Theatre, the American Liu, 49, diagnosed that the apprehension about Al technologies is often a red herring: “It’s almost always the fact that there are people who are trying to use Al as a tool to make things cheaper, faster, and to displace human craftspeople from their positions.

"This is fundamentally a complaint about capitalism rather than a complaint about AI - and I think it's important for us to separate the ways global capitalism wishes to use AI versus what AI actually is.”

He was responding to moderator Felicia Low-Jimenez’s question about their forecasts for AI.

Chinese writer Hao, who has been a startup founder for 81/2 years, responded: “I used to have a big problem with human resources because I needed a lot of staff to do things. But when I started to use Al to do a lot of work, I really found that AI does a lot of work better and faster than my employees.”