Still, his creation keeps growing, absorbing our reality in the process. If you're reading this online, Berners-Lee wrote the hypertext markup language (HTML) that your browser is interpreting. He's the necessary condition behind everything from Amazon to Wikipedia, and if A.I. brings about what Sam Altman recently called "the gentle singularity"-or else buries us in slop-that, too, will be an outgrowth of his global collective consciousness.
While the United States rushes head-first into a self-inflicted economic crisis in an attempt to develop AI with human-level intelligence, China is eying a different goal. Last week, the Chinese State Council unveiled its ten-year plan to fully integrate AI into every aspect of the country's economy by 2035. Called "AI+," the ambitious plan sees AI becoming a "key growth engine for the country's economic development," a transformation mirroring that of the internet age.