It is clear from Xi Jinping’s strategic directions that China’s priority is to apply AI to the “real economy,” thereby increasing productivity in traditional economic sectors and especially in manufacturing. This strategy is intended to respond to several problems facing the Chinese economy in this historical period: slowing economic growth, a rapidly aging population, and decelerating productivity. Under state leadership, AI is intended to become the leading technology in the innovation of China’s productive sectors, which are thus going to draw not so much on the performance of generative AI but operational AI. These are vertical forms of narrow AI, designed to make various production sectors more competitive.
However, China-like Japan itself, which is a winning model in the adoption of technology in every compartment-is also facing a “diffusion deficit” of innovation from the academic to the business sphere: this deficit, combined with an imbalance between the supply and demand for skilled professional skills, gives rise to the need to invest in training.
Even in these technologically advanced countries, therefore, the gap between innovation and development through the application of the innovations produced is evident. Moving from words to deeds is always complex. Not least because of a likely major impact of automation on employment, which may take on critical dimensions in China.
Italiano