How to spot a genius

In an age of artificial intelligence, the human kind is increasingly important.

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Mr Ervin Macic was despondent. While in school he twice won medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and researched artificial intelligence (AD), trying to speed up how models make predictions.

He dreamed of one day joining an Al lab to make the technology safe. Yet the 19-year-old Bosnian prodigy was unable to take a spot at the University of Oxford: its fees of £60,000 (S$104,000) a year were five times his family’s annual income. So he went to the University of Sarajevo, where he sat programming exams on a decades-old IBM computer.

Mr Macic’s case is far from unique. Around the world, vast amounts of talent goes to waste. Economists speak of “lost Einsteins” who might have produced transformative work had they been identified and nurtured.

Nowhere are the consequences clearer than in AI, where the scarcity of top researchers allows a tiny cadre to command chief executive-level pay. Governments that lavish billions on semiconductors to win the Al race neglect the talent that drives progress. Brains, treated with the same urgency, may prove a better longer-term investment. What might an industrial policy for talent look like?

For now, such policy amounts to procurement, not production. Governments focus on the last step: enticing existing superstars. The contest is fiercest between China and America. China’s Thousand Talents Plan, set up in 2008, aims to lure back citizens trained at elite foreign programmes; this October it will add a flexible K-visa to attract science, technology, engineering and mathematics specialists. America counters with the O-1A visa and EB-1A green card, both reserved for individuals of “extraordinary ability”.

Other countries dabble. Japan has announced a US$700 million (S$902 million) package to recruit top researchers. The EU’s “Choose Europe” scheme promises to make it a “magnet for researchers”.