Live: Huawei CEO speaks on 'averting tech war' at Davos 华为创始人在达沃斯世界经济论坛发表讲话

I have read Professor Harari's 'Brief History of the Future' and '21 Lessons for the 21st Century', and I agree with many of his views on rules governing the development of human society and the conflict between technology and future social structure and changes in ideology. But first and foremost, we should see that technology is for good. The development of technology is not for bad, but for good. Human history has gone through a long period of time. Over the last thousands of years, technological advancement was very much in sync with humans' biological evolution. People were not that worried or concerned when steamships and trains appeared. When textile machines appeared, people had concerns. However, with the development of industrial society, those fears disappeared over time. As society continues to evolve, it came to where we are today, the information society. What does it mean? It's where electronics technology is so advanced. Moore's Law will still be there as the constraint of the electronics industry, but once we come to 3 or 2 nanometer of a chipset process technology, this is something we know for sure. And with the explosive development of computing power, information technology is pervasive, it's everywhere. The breakthroughs of biotech and other emerging technologies, and the breakthroughs across different disciplines and domains are obscuring, helping accumulate capacity, ultimately leading to technology explosion. Technology explosion that causes a fear among people, whether that's good or bad. Me, I think it's for the good. I believe in the face of new technologies, humanity will be able to use new technologies to benefit society instead of destroy society, because the majority of people in society aspire for a good life instead of a miserable life. When I was born, that was the time when the atom bomb was exploded in Japan. When I was six or seven, the biggest fear people had was around atom bombs. That was a global fear for death. But if we look at life or history from a distance, we see enormous benefit from atomic energy and radiation application in medicine and others that brought about enormous benefits to humanity. Today we are seeing fears about artificial intelligence, but we should not over-exaggerate. The explosion of atom bombs would hurt people, but people can manage that. And AI is not as damaging as atom bombs, right? And the far away our research is the so-called weak AI. There are boundaries, there are constraints, there are enabling datasets to enable that. And using things like autonomous driving, mining, biomedicine and other domains, there are clear boundaries in terms of where AI can be applied. With more advancement of AI, it can enormously create total wealth. And people are saying many people would lose their jobs as total wealth is being created, and that is a societal issue that needs to be addressed. But you'd better have more total wealth than less. Today in society we live in, no matter if it's poor people or rich people, the absolute amount of total wealth is much more than what we had. In that case, of course, the rich-poor divide is bigger. That does not mean you still have many people below the absolute poverty line. To address the widening income gap, that's a social issue, not a technical issue.

Professor Harari said the US government did not figure out the implications of AI, and I think the Chinese government even did not start thinking about it. If China and the United States started thinking about it this year, they invest more in basic education and basic research. If you look at the education system in China, it's pretty much the same system designed for the industrial age, designed to develop engineers. Therefore, I think AI cannot grow very rapidly in China. AI requires a lot of mathematicians, requires a lot of supercomputers, and requires a lot of super conductivity and super storage. In those areas, China is still at the starting point. When it comes to science and technology, therefore, what the US is over-concerned about, the US has got used to being the world number one, and this should be the best in everything they do. If there is someone who is better than them, they might not feel comfortable. But that does not mean this is the trend the world is heading. I think for the entire humanity, we should all do serious study around AI and how to use AI to benefit society. Professor Harari mentioned just now you need to develop right rules to define what should be studied and what cannot be studied and researched to control and manage where AI is heading. Personally, I think in the next 20 to 30 years, or even beyond, Mr. Harari's ideas around human body being hacked and electronics being incorporated into human bodies into a seamless one entity, that's something I do not see that can become a reality in the next 20 to 30 years. AI, more importantly, can be used for production, for efficiency gains, for wealth creation. As long as there is more total wealth, governments have the means to have more balanced wealth distribution to balance out the social problems. I recently published an article in The Economist that also cited, and I wrote about electronics chipsets and their combination with biotech and what would the main... and that line was deleted by The Economist. Maybe that was too controversial for them. And when they referred the article back to me, I agreed to take that down. I know I'm giving them a hard problem.

Huawei used to be an admirer of the United States. Huawei is quite successful today largely because we learned from the US for the most part of our management system. Since day one of Huawei, we hired dozens of American consulting firms teaching us how to manage our business operations. During that period of time, the entire management system of Huawei is very much like the US. The US should feel proud of that, they have the US management systems being exported and implemented extensively at Huawei, contributing to Huawei's development. From that perspective, I think the US should not be over-concerned about Huawei and what Huawei's position in the world is. Regarding the entity list, well, it was added to the list last year, and it didn't hurt us much. We basically withstood the challenges. We did some preparation before that. This year, the US might further escalate their content and get tougher, but I feel the impact of Huawei's business would not be very significant. More than 10 years ago, Huawei was a very poor company. More than 20 years ago, I personally did not have my own home. I lived in an apartment of 30 square meters. All the money I had was put into R&D of the company. If we had this sense of security from the US, we did not have the need to come up with our backup plans. Since we didn't have that sense of security, we spent hundreds of billions of money to put our own plans in place. That's why we withstood the first round of attack. And this year, in 2020, since we already gained experience from last year and we got a stronger team, I think we are more confident that we can survive even further attacks. But whether the world will be split into two systems, I don't think so. Because science is about truth. There is only one truth, it's unique. Any scientist who discovers the truth would make it known to all the people around the world. And at a very deep-lying layer, the whole world is united, it's all linked. And the technology inventions are multiple, in diverse forms and a diversified look. Look at the cars as an example. You know, there are so many different models of cars competing in a market with each other, and that's conducive to societal progress. You can't say you can only have one technology standard or technology invention. But whether the world would be split, I don't think so. Because deep down, it's all united, it's all linked.

What Professor Harari perceived about the future of science and technology, we are not sure whether that can become a reality, and we do not rule out that possibility at this point of time. As society, as businesses, we need to understand deeply. Companies, for example, for mining, whether it can be a wonderful center powered by AI and robotics, it can be done. And our technology has already been able to do that with remote control over thousands of kilometers. And if the mines are located in high altitude or frozen regions, the value is significant to improve production output. And in some of the mines in Brazil, they can use this AI-powered ways of production. It can be done. And that requires very in-depth understanding of those companies in order to make technology work. And it's not just about Huawei as a technology provider, it's primarily the industry experts working on mining and electronics experts coming together, then we can deliver relevant solutions. That's the same story for remote health as well. It takes a step-by-step process to know more about people. Like Professor Harari mentioned, the human body being hacked and you have this Homo Deus. Don't worry, you know, humans will die at 80, their souls cannot be inherited, so people cannot become Homo Deus.

I think I'm not an expert in military. If everybody can produce armed robots, I think it's like a stick, right? It's not anymore weapons.

For you, yes. Technology makes communication much easier. People have a deeper understanding about the things around them. People are getting smarter, and if that pace is picking up, just like us, when we read textbooks in primary school, we can't fully understand and we cannot imagine what it is. But primary students ask your students, and many of the things we used to study in universities already are being studied in middle schools today. As humanity is progressing in society, it should be the people to master the knowledge and technology. And the people mastering different skills will define the different jobs. I think people have this initiative that they can take. People would not be enslaved. Individual people, more agency and more power should...