When AI Rules the World, by Handel Jones

I first met Handel Jones in the early 1980s, I think. I was at VLSI Technology, and this Welsh guy showed up and presented some results from looking at our order book. We, along with LSI Logic, had pretty much invented ASIC and had a lot of different designs either in production or getting close to tapeout. Handel told us that we were losing money on all but the highest volume, 5% or so, literally a handful of designs. Our cost model said otherwise. But it turned out Handel was right. Our cost model was built for a "normal" fab with high volume runs of relatively few products. But we had low volume runs of a large number of products, and our cost model did not take into account the setup time required to switch a tool from one mask set to the next. In fact, our tools spent most of their time being switched and not much time actually operating. Once our cost model gurus fixed that, it was clear that our prices for low-volume products were way too low.

Handel last made an appearance in Breakfast Bytes at the 2018 DAC. See my post DAC Monday: Amazon's Things, Handel's Megadesign, Cooley's Troublemakers, where he had plenty of criticism for the EDA industry for getting so little value commensurate with its importance:

If you are an EDA vendor, why do you get so little money? Will it change? We don’t think it will.

For reasons I now forget, I went to Handel's house just before I rejoined Cadence, and we had a glass of wine looking out over Silicon Valley. There are two roads into the hills in Los Gatos, Shannon and Kennedy. But there are no roads linking them. It turns out I used to live just across the hill from Handel, although to get from my house to his required going all the way down the Los Gatos Boulevard and then back up again.

When AI Rules the World

Anyway, today is about Handel's latest book, When AI Rules the World: China, the US, and the Race to Control a Smart Planet. I have a proof PDF copy. The book will actually be published on October 11, but you can preorder it on Amazon already. First, I confess I have not read the book cover to cover (or whatever the pdf equivalent is).

Here is Handel's synopsis:

As China rises to true superpower status, the United States must take immediate action to catch up in AI capabilities—or face falling disastrously behind technologically, economically, and militarily.

Over the past decade, China has quietly and methodically moved into a near-leadership position in artificial intelligence technologies on a global scale. Meanwhile, the United States has responded ineffectively, weighed down by politics, bureaucracy, and an absence of clear strategy.

In the near future, wars will be fought not over land, but over data. Machines will quickly discover individualized treatments for diseases, and with the help of virtual reality, AI will inspect buildings that have not yet been built. With the rising interest in these technologies by both China and the U.S., who will emerge as the victor of this technological race?

When AI Rules the World is an investigation and call to action into AI technologies for a nation that does not yet comprehend the full gravity of the AI revolution. The United States is losing the race for AI dominance, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

So what are Handel's qualifications to write this book? From the introduction:

I have been in a unique position to observe AI development and implementation in China and the United States in recent years. A veteran of four decades in the technology and defense industries, I have worked in both military companies and Silicon Valley. In addition, I have spent years tracking technology in China and getting to know the players in Chinese industry. I have traveled to China almost fifty times in the last fifteen years as a consultant to American and foreign companies, and have given countless presentations on Chinese high technology. I have also published three books related to China, including China’s Globalization (How China Becomes Number 1), which was a best seller there.

If you want confirmation of many of the themes of Handel's book, I recommend AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee. Broadly speaking, Handel writes from the American point of view, and Kai-Fu writes from the Chinese point of view. So these two books complement each other, although there are a lot of common messages in the two books.

But investment clearly needs to increase:

The Pentagon has fallen behind the commercial sector in AI and machine learning, cloud computing, edge computing. Two facts tell the story: Five of the largest American technology companies—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft—spent approximately $70 billion on research and development in 2018. The five largest defense contractors spent about $7 billion in that year. In addition, they are not particularly adept at creating software.

I've written about this phenomenon before in the context of automotive. Tesla aside, you can make a similar criticism of Western automotive companies. Big strength: internal combustion engines (ICE). Big weakness: electronic and software design. Requirements for the future: no ICE engines, lots of software. Oops.

Handel has a chapter on automotive:

The automotive industry is undergoing three interrelated, AI-driven revolutions simultaneously: the rise of electric vehicles, the emergence of ride-hailing and shared mobility services, and the development of automated or autonomous vehicles.

As it happens, I have a 2017 (five years ago!) blog post on just this topic Triple Witching Hour for Automotive. Quote (from me in that post):

First, the biggest factor that makes an existing car company competitive will go away, and gradually cars will become electric. Second, a key technology for the future is one that no existing car company already has as a core competence, namely software.

To wrap up, the chapters of the book are:

• Introduction
• Miracles and Dangers: The Coming of AI
• Who Is Leading the AI Revolution?
• Smart Warfare: The Emerging Digital Battlefield
• Smart Healthcare: Two Nations, Two Sets of Challenges
• Smart Cars: The Three Revolutions
• Invented Worlds: Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
• Smart Objects: 5G Wireless and the Internet of Things
• China vs. the United States: A Sprint or a Marathon?

AI Hype Cycle

Nothing directly to do with Handel's book, but here is the current Gartner Hype Cycle for AI:

 

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