Press
Interview with Tian Feng
1) What have you been busy with lately?
Thinking about how new businesses start up, develop, and evolve in the fertile field of technology.
2) What is your role within the Alibaba company?
As Alibaba Group’s technology think tank, Alibaba Cloud Research Center assumes the mission of exploring new business boundaries by way of technology.
3) Which aspects of your work will change the world most ?
First, allow more people to see the future by predicting technology and business inflexion points, including the emergence of VR in 2016, AI in 2017, blockchain in 2018, and data sharing platforms in 2019.
Second, provide technological tools to business leaders who aspire to change the world.
Third, create the Wikipedia of the next generation, and leverage AI and social network technology to develop Alibot to carry out open-source, inclusive and co-creation of a new retail knowledge graph.
4) How do you see the international role of Alibaba change in the future?
First, the world will usher in an era of global population aging by 2050. Technology is inclusive and created by the masses. Alibaba Cloud is the soil that will nurture new public welfare, new public services, and new businesses. The future is hidden at the edges of cloud computing and sprouting inconspicuously.
Second, technology grows exponentially. This implies that growth in the next century will be 10 times, 100 times, and even 1000 times that of the current rate. Exploring the limits of human capacity is the mission and positioning of DAMO Academy (Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook; Alibaba’s global research institution) and Luohan Academy (Alibaba’s global technology governance and business ethics research institution).
Third, offering people a better life is the goal of Alibaba’s various business units involved in culture and entertainment, health, and new retail. The mighty Taobao, quality Tmall and vibrant Juhuasuan will bring the best goods from around the world to farmers in mountainous regions, people in Africa and little kids in Southeast Asia.
5) Can AI play a major role in the creation of content, like books, images, films?
If human beings are logical, human creation should be logical as well. Feelings and inspiration could be the outcome of more complex algorithms. As Westworld puts it, human thinking can be fully simulated using N number of indices. Ultimately, the “old carbon-based human species” will create the “new silicon-based human species” so that human beings can enter a long era of the “great cosmic odyssey”. Perhaps future human beings will be able to share intelligence based on the internet of biological things , like that of bee and ant colonies, resulting in a more advanced group intelligence.
6) Can AI be creative at all?
Certainly. Creation is a more complex algorithm. As the infinite monkey theorem states: “A monkey hitting a keyboard randomly for an infinite amount of time will be able to type any text in the world.” Quantum computing is precisely this “quick-as-lightning” monkey. In the quantum era, human beings will experience a “new renaissance” triggered by quantum intelligence.
7) What do you think are the big differences in public opinion on AI in China, the USA and in Europe?
Because of the enormous population over a 2000-year period, China hopes AI will bring a happy life to humanity;
because of world dominance over the span of a hundred years, the US hopes AI will result in the next generation of global economic supremacy;
because of privacy protection and the pursuit of freedom, Europe has contained AI in “Pandora’s Box”.
Tian Feng will be speaking at the StoryDrive conference in Beijing (28 May - 1 June 2019).