What a visit to China’s AI labs reveals about the battle for global soft power

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Inside the exhibition hall of a Shanghai-based artificial intelligence research institute, an ink-wash map covered an entire wall, immediately drawing your attention.It was a cartography of AI: chipmakers were rendered as mountains on islands and algorithms as jagged mountain ranges, while questions of privacy, fairness and machine consciousness drifted at the edges like uncharted islands.Foreign guests and I leaned in, tracing the brushstrokes.“Why is Huawei’s chip placed right at the...