AI 2041

lt;b>Kai-Fu Lee is the CEO of Sinovation Ventures and New York Times bestselling author of AI Superpowers. Lee was formerly the president of Google China and a senior executive at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple. Co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence Council at the World Economic Forum, he has a bachelor s degree from Columbia and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Lee s numerous honors include being named to the Time 100 and Wired 25 Icons lists. He is based in Beijing.

Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chan) is an award-winning author, translator, creative producer, and curator. He is the president of the World Chinese Science Fiction Association. His works include Waste Tide, Future Disease, and The Algorithms for Life. The founder of Thema Mundi, a content development studio, he lives in Beijing and Shanghai.

Chapter One

The Golden Elephant

Story translated by Blake Stone-Banks

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to imitate somebody else s perfectly.

Bhagavad Gita ( , Song of God or Hindu Scripture) chapter 3, verse 35

Note from Kai-Fu: The opening story takes readers to Mumbai, where we meet a family who has signed up for a deep-learning-enabled insurance program. This dynamic insurance program engages with the insured in the form of a series of apps intended to better their lives. The family s teenage daughter, however, finds that the AI program s persuasive nudges complicate her search for love. The Golden Elephant introduces the basics of AI and deep learning, offering a sense of its main strengths and weaknesses. In particular, the story illustrates how AI can single-mindedly try to optimize certain goals, but sometimes create detrimental externalities. The story also suggests the risks when one company possesses so much data from its users. In my commentary at the end of the chapter, I will explore these issues, offering a brief history of AI and why it excites many but has become a source of distrust for others.


On the screen, the three-story statue of Ganesh swayed in the surf of Chowpatty Beach as though synced to the sitar soundtrack. With each wave, the towering idol descended lower until it was engulfed by the Arabian Sea. In the salty brine, the statue dissolved into gold and burgundy foam, washing onto Chowpatty Beach, where the colors clung like blessings to the legions of believers who had gathered for the Visarjan immersion ritual celebrating the end of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival.

In her family s Mumbai apartment, Nayana watched as her grandparents clapped their hands and sang along to the TV. Her younger brother, Rohan, took a mouthful of cassava chips and a deep swig from his diet cola. Though he was only eight, Rohan was under doctor s orders to strictly control his fat and sugar intake. As he wagged his head in excitement, crumbs sprayed from his mouth and flew across the floor. In the kitchen, Papa Sanjay and Mama Riya banged on pots and crooned like they were in a Bollywood film.

Nayana tried to shut them all out of her mind. The tenth-grader was instead focusing all her energy on her smartstream, where she had downloaded FateLeaf. The new app was all Nayana s classmates could seem to talk about lately. It was said to possess the answer to almost any question, thanks to the prescience of India s greatest fortune tellers.

The app its branding and ad campaign made clear was inspired by the Hindu sage Agastya, who was said to have engraved the past, present, and future lives of all people in Sanskrit onto palm leaves, so-called Nadi leaves, thousands of years ago.

According to the legend, simply by providing one s thumbprints and birthdate to a Nadi leaf fortune teller, a person could have their life story foretold from the corresponding leaf. The problem was that many leaves had been lost to meddling colonialists, war, and time. In 2025, a tech company tracked down and scanned all the known Nadi leaves still in circulation. The company used AI to perform deep learning, auto-translation, and analysis of the remaining leaves. The result was the creation of virtual Nadi leaves, stored in the cloud one for each of the 8.7 billion people on Earth.

Nayana was not dwelling on the ancient history of the Nadi leaves. She had a more pressing matter on her mind. Users of the FateLeaf app could seek to uncover the wisdom of their Nadi leaf by posing various questions. While her family watched the Ganesh Visarjan celebration on TV, Nayana nervously typed out a question within the app: Does Sahej like me? Before she clicked Send, a noti