It's Monday, October 1st, 2018, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Andrei Viscontas.

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

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When I think about who are the tech superpowers and where the leading edge innovations are coming from in terms of technology

and especially artificial intelligence, I can't help but turn my gaze towards Silicon Valley.

Maybe it's because I live not too far away, but also because that's where most of the media

focuses their attention. And yet, in the last couple of years, there's been an amazing emergence of technology coming from China.

And it's a place where the market is so huge that even if we've never heard of a company,

that particular company can be even larger than some of the companies that we think of as the biggest in the world.

To help us understand the emergence of these

new technologies, what they mean for everyone else in the Western world, and what are the kinds

of ways in which artificial intelligence is going to change our life, I talked to Dr. Kai Fu Lee.

Dr. Kai Fu Lee is the chairman and CEO of C Synovation Ventures, which is a leading venture capital firm

focused on developing the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies.

But before he founded Sinnovation about almost 10 years ago, he was the president of Google China.

And before that, he was an executive at Microsoft and SGI and Apple.

He also holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University,

and he's been a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence for many decades.

And in fact, he was one of the first people to program an artificial intelligence

that beat humans at a game that was thought to be only human.

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