China looks to school kids to win the global AI race
China wants to be a world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. To get there, it needs to equip pupils and high school students with basic AI knowledge
The textbook, released in April and named “Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence”, comes around six months after China’s State Council called for the inclusion of AI-related courses in primary and secondary education.
AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines including learning, reasoning and self-correction and is becoming a transformative business force along with robotics and virtual reality. Global business value derived from AI is expected to hit US$3.9 trillion by 2022, according to a forecast by research house Gartner in April this year.
A recent report from the Tencent Research Institute highlighted that the US leads other countries in both the quantity and quality of AI personnel and that China won’t be able to solve its talent shortage in the near term despite prioritising the area in 2017. Demand for AI professionals in China may surge to 5 million in a few years’ time, according to a December 2017 report by the People’s Daily, which cited Zhou Ming, a vice director of education at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.