1 PINS AND NEEDLES IN D.C.
The hotel lobby was plain and unpretentious, reflecting an itinerary that valued proximity over luxury, and the ambience was gentle: polite conversations between guests and the concierge, the hum of rolling suitcase wheels, the periodic whir of glass doors opening and closing. But I felt anxious, and the hurried clacking of my boots on thin carpet seemed to echo my mood. As a lifelong academic on my way to testify before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on the topic of artificial intelligence, I suppose nerves were to be expected. But they weren’t helped by the red-eye flight from the West Coast, the near-total lack of sleep the night before, or the tense rehearsing of my statement—again, and again, and again—that had filled the preceding hours. It was June 26, 2018, and each passing minute brought me closer to a career first: an appearance at, of all things, a congressional hearing.
A pale morning was waiting outside as I stepped onto the sidewalk. The street was densely lined with federal buildings, blunt and monochrome, worlds away from the scenery I was used to in California, where tract housing and trendy office parks abounded, accented by the occasional burst of mission-style architecture. Here, even the masonry felt heavier, and certainly older. The capital is a place that wears its history on its sleeve.
I recalled my first visit here, before AI, before academia, and before Silicon Valley, when the entirety of my identity—as far as the world was concerned, anyway—fit within the confines of a single word: “immigrant.” Trips are trying affairs for cash-strapped families with minimal English-speaking skills; most activities fall into two categories—“free” and “prohibitively expensive”—and so much is clouded by a second-language haze that never seems to disperse. Even so, my memories of a visit to the National Air and Space Museum still sparkled. Its life-sized exhibits demonstrated the scale and gallantry of aerospace history, overwhelming my senses and igniting my imagination. I was reminded that even as a teenage girl living well beyond the margins of society, the world I wanted to inhabit most of all was that of science.
Unlikely as it seemed at the time, I found my way to the furthest reaches of that world in the years that followed. Not aerospace, but the science of the mind, and the still-nascent study of intelligent machines. And when a breakthrough technique called “deep learning” began making history barely a decade into my career, AI became a very, very big deal.
Although it had taken more than a half century for the necessary preconditions to align—historic milestones in the evolution of algorithms, large-scale data, and raw computing power, all converging at the dawn of the 2010s—it took less than a half decade for the capabilities they unleashed to change the world. Businesses were transformed, billions of dollars were invested, and everyone from industry analysts to political commentators to philosophers was left scrambling to make sense of a technology that had seemed to explode, overnight, from an academic niche to a force for global change. If nothing else, the sheer speed and scope of AI’s emergence, arguably unprecedented in all of history, warranted the attention of legislators like the ones I’d soon face.
Of course, there was more to the story. Within only a few years, the tech industry’s exuberance was tempered by the growing concerns of journalists, advocacy groups, and even governments. The mounting harms of biased algorithms, fears of widespread job displacement, and unsettling visions of surveillance became fixtures in the media, souring the public conception of AI to a degree not commonly seen in the world of technology.
I’d tried to summarize these tensions in an op-ed published a few months earlier in The New York Times. Although the piece was limited to around eight hundred words, I did my best to balance my excitement about the future of my field with the many legitimate concerns raised by its critics. I wrote that the true impact of AI on the world would be largely determined by the motivation that guided the development of the technology—a disturbing thought in an era of expanding facial recognition and targeted advertising. But if we were to broaden our vision for AI to explicitly include a positive impact on humans and communities—if our definition of success could include such things—I was convinced that AI could change the world for the better. I still am.
That belief in the future appeared to have played a role in my invitation to testify. I’d recently cofounded AI4ALL, an educational nonprofit intended to foster greater inclusion in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) by opening university labs to girls, people of color, and other underrepresented groups, all at the high school level. In fact, my efforts to diversify the field were cited as a key reason for the panel’s interest in my participation. Given the fraught nature of the subject matter, it was encouraging to be associated with something unapologetically hopeful.
My pace quickened. The Capitol Building was now centered on my horizon, every bit as picturesque in person, although I still hadn’t quite internalized the fact that it was my destination. I did, however, notice a conspicuous lack of the paper maps that had played such a persistent role during my teenage trip—a reminder of how much smartphones had changed daily life, including tourism, in the intervening years. But smartphones, too, had begun to show their dark side, making 2018 a fraught time for a representative from the world of technology to preach a message of human-centered optimism.
For better or worse, my op-ed came in the thick of the “techlash”: a growing consensus that Silicon Valley’s ambitions had reached excessive, even predatory extremes. At any other time in my career, such a controversy would have felt light-years away from a little-known academic like me. As it happened, however, I was past the midpoint of a twenty-one-month sabbatical from my professorship at Stanford and was serving as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud—placing me well within its epicenter. Google was my first nonacademic employer since the dry-cleaning shop I ran with my family, and I was only months away from a full-time return to the university. But there was no changing the optics that afternoon.
Paradoxically, my concerns about being mistaken for some kind of industry insider ran parallel to my now decades-long struggle as an outsider. Like many immigrants, I felt hemmed in by cultural divides that crisscrossed my life, ranging from the invisible to the unmistakable. I spent the majority of each day speaking a second language. And I was a woman in a male-dominated field so consistently symbolized by the now archetypal image of “guys in hoodies” that the phrase had lost any trace of irony. After so many years spent wondering whether I belonged—anywhere, really—Congress seemed like an unlikely place to let down my guard.
If the committee had concerns about the future of this technology, it only reinforced how much we had in common. I did, too. I’d always been an optimist about the power of science, and I remained so, but the tumultuous years leading up to that day had taught me that the fruits of optimism aren’t to be taken for granted. While the future might indeed be bright, it wouldn’t be so by accident. We’d have to earn it, together, and it wasn’t entirely clear how.
Still, something else weighed on my mind as I cut a path across the city. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I was by my mother’s side in a hospital in Palo Alto, as I had been for weeks. She’s faced innumerable threats to her health over the decades, both chronic and acute, and we were still reeling from the latest. Much of my written testimony, in fact, was drafted in a cramped chair just outside of her room in the ICU, amidst a blur of blue scrubs and white coats. I’d even attended preparation meetings for the hearing remotely, our conversations compressed into a laptop screen, contending with the bustle of orderlies and the intermittent tones of the hospital paging system.
My being the only child and sole financial support of two parents—not to mention the translator between our caretakers’ English and their native Mandarin—there was no escaping the feeling that it was wrong to even consider a trip like this. Disease, however, is no match for the pride of an immigrant mother; the opportunity to see her daughter address the United States Congress, little more than two decades after arriving in this country, was simply too much to pass up. She’d been an unfailing source of support throughout my career, and was, as I should have expected, adamant that I attend.
Her encouragement convinced me to go, but it was hardly enough to assuage my fears. What if she ended up needing me after all? What if I got the call I’d been dreading since I’d boarded the flight that brought me here? What if, for reasons that had nothing to do with technology, or culture, or politics, this was all a terrible mistake?
Then, as if to force my deliberations aside, my first glimpse of the hearing’s venue was upon me: the enormous gray exterior of the Rayburn House Office Building. Its styling isn’t as iconic as the Capitol Building’s rotunda, presiding over the Mall from across the street, but it’s every bit as faithful to the city’s neoclassical style, a signature that I’d appreciated since my first American civics class. And it’s no less imposing to a visitor approaching its facade, with its towering columns and eagle-emblazoned pediment.
Inside, beyond metallic gate-like double doors, I took my place in a slow-moving procession of visitors. Registration, badging, and security checks. The whirlwind that led me here—the hastily booked travel arrangements, the restless preparation, the neurosis of an overactive imagination—appeared to be subsiding, finally; all that remained was to wait for the proceedings to begin. I took a seat and fully exhaled for the first time since waking up, craning my neck toward the vaulted ceilings and the flags that seemed to hang down everywhere I looked. Even the lobby conveyed a sense of national extravagance.
My mother was right to demand I attend. I was certain the future of AI would depend on institutions far beyond science, including education, activism, and, of course, government. As quaint as Washington, D.C., could seem from Silicon Valley, places like this would matter as much as the Stanfords and Googles of the world. The founding ideals of this country, however imperfectly they’ve been practiced in the centuries since, seemed as wise a foundation as any on which to build the future of technology: the dignity of the individual, the intrinsic value of representation, and the belief that human endeavors are best when guided by the many, rather than the few.
I was energized by the thought of AI being shaped by such a coalition—public and private, technological and philosophical—and it replaced the pins and needles of my walk across the city with a flicker of excitement. In fact, noticing that the entrance to the chamber was open, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to look around before the hearing stole my attention. So, glancing slyly in both directions to ensure the coast was clear, I stepped inside.
Through the doors I found an appropriately stately interior, with windows extending from floor to ceiling, wooden shutters, and tassel-clad curtains. Rows of audience seating and room for the press packed the space, with framed portraits lining the surrounding walls. Looming over it all was an ornate dais, its cushioned seats outfitted with microphones and name plates for the committee members who would soon occupy them. At the center of the room was the witness table, waiting for me. I was amused to see my name, DR. LI, printed unceremoniously in Times New Roman on an 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of paper and slid into a reusable name plate of my own. It was charming—even a bit reassuring—to find something so modest in the middle of such an intimidating scene.
The silence hung for a few more seconds before being broken by the murmur of the chamber beginning to fill: representatives and their aides, members of the media, and, finally, my fellow witnesses—Dr. Tim Persons, chief scientist of the Government Accountability Office, and Greg Brockman, cofounder and chief technology officer of a recently founded start-up called OpenAI. This was it.
I took my seat, along with a few deep breaths, and tried to keep cool as I felt the first pulse of adrenaline race through me. This wasn’t my classroom, I reminded myself; these weren’t students and I wasn’t here to deliver a lecture. I had one idea to share today, and I repeated it in my thoughts like a mantra. It matters what motivates the development of AI, in both science and industry, and I believe that motivation must explicitly center on human benefit. I tried to put everything else out of my mind—the dark side of AI, the techlash, even, for a few minutes, my mother’s condition. Back to that mantra. It matters what motivates the development—
“The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will come to order.” They were the first words I heard amplified through the room’s PA system, snapping me back into the moment. “Good morning, and welcome to today’s hearing, entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence—With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.’”
I pushed the anxieties out of my mind. Whatever awaited me, I was sure of one thing: this technology had the power to transform the world for the better. How exactly we’d reach that future remained an open question, but it was clear, even then, that conversations like the one about to begin were our best chance at answering it. I’d flown across the country and left my ailing mother’s bedside to be here, and I couldn’t leave without making that clear.
Whatever the committee’s agenda for the day might be, I was beginning to understand mine. The room had filled, the cameras were recording, and the microphones were hot. Minutes away from addressing the most important audience of my career, I was resolving, as one moment of slow motion bled into the next, to share it all: my hopes and my fears, my conviction and my uncertainty. Everything. That the power of science was as worthy of our optimism as ever, but that truly harnessing it—safely, fairly, and sustainably—would require much more than science alone.
I believe our civilization stands on the cusp of a technological revolution with the power to reshape life as we know it. To ignore the millennia of human struggle that serves as our society’s foundation, however—to merely “disrupt,” with the blitheness that has accompanied so much of this century’s innovation—would be an intolerable mistake. This revolution must build on that foundation, faithfully. It must respect the collective dignity of a global community. And it must always remember its origins: the restless imagination of an otherwise unremarkable species of hominid, so mystified by its own nature that it now seeks to re-create it in silicon. This revolution must, therefore, be unequivocally human-centered.
More than two decades earlier, a journey had begun that defined the person I’d become. It was an improbable, often inexplicable path that led me across oceans, from the middle class to poverty and back again, to the lecture halls of the Ivy League and the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Gradually, it shaped everything I’d come to believe about this technology—the inspiring, the challenging, and the frightening—and where I believe it will go next. Most important, it served as a twenty-year lesson on the essential role of humanity in the technological quest that I’m certain will define this century.
2 SOMETHING TO CHASE
A leafy canopy swayed high above us, a frame of pure shadow surrounding a portrait of the night sky. Along with a handful of schoolmates scattered nearby, I craned my neck, transfixed, as our guide pointed out constellations. We were a rapt audience, so quiet that even his near whisper seemed to boom into the canyon below, although a wave of oohs would wash over us whenever a shooting star stole our attention.
“Above us is the romance of the cowherd and the weaver,” he said. Not quite sure how to respond, we simply continued to stare upward.
“See over there?” he asked while tracing loosely around a glittering handful of stars with an outstretched index finger. “That’s Zhī nǚ, a weaver and a goddess. Today, astronomers call her brightest star Vega. And that’s Niú láng, a mortal cowherd, a constellation that’s home to the star Altair. But their love was forbidden, so they were banished to opposing sides of the heavens.”
We were a few days into a hiking trip through the wilderness led by my art teacher. It was a formidable trek, but one that offered surprising luxuries for ten-year-old adventurers like us; rather than camping out, we stayed with families who made their homes right there in the mountains, and the memory of their hospitality has never left me. They provided a warm place to sleep and food truly made from scratch, including generous meals of aromatic rice and a cured prosciutto-like pork called là ròu, both of which I miss to this day. Even the streams were a subtle delight, burbling gently with clear runoff from high above, far from industrial contamination, collected by the locals through a network of bamboo pipes. I distinctly recall the water tasting so pure it was almost sweet.
“Now, separating Zhī nǚ and Niú láng is a river of stars. See it running between them?” He gestured at a softly glowing path tracing its way across the sky, like columns of celestial clouds. “That’s our galaxy.”
In a region where overcast skies were the norm, clear nights like this were very special, igniting my curiosity and stoking my fascination with nature. From my earliest memories, the simple experience of perceiving things—anything—preoccupied me in a way I felt deeply but couldn’t express. Everywhere I looked, it was as if something new was waiting to arouse another glint of wonder, whether it was the stillness of a plant, the careful steps of an insect, or the hazy depth of far-off peaks. I didn’t know much about the world yet, but I could tell it was a place worth exploring.
“Ah, look—here’s one of my favorites.”
He pointed higher.
“Those seven stars form the base of běi dǒu qī xīng—the Big Dipper. Now follow a line upward like this,” he said, gesturing up to the right. “You see that bright one? For centuries, it was probably the most important star in the sky. Běi jí xīng. The North Star.”
* * *
I was born the only child of a family in a state of quiet upheaval. I could feel an air of uncertainty throughout my early years, and sensed from a young age that something—perhaps many somethings—had left my elders reeling. Over time, new layers of their discontent revealed themselves: unrealized dreams, pangs of regret verging on unrest, and a persistent feeling that even the place we called home wasn’t truly ours. It was a picture I pieced together gradually, connecting the dots of overheard chats and stray asides as children naturally do.
Although born in Beijing, China, I was raised more than a thousand miles away, in Chengdu, capital of the Sichuan province. It was, nominally, the home of my mother’s family, although their arrival was recent. Originally from Hangzhou, near the coastal region of Shanghai, they fled like thousands of others as their towns were ravaged by the Second Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. They were grateful to have survived, but were left with an inescapable sense of displacement that still reverberated a generation later.
My maternal grandfather was especially given to pained reflections on life before the turmoil; a star student with a promising future, he was left with little choice but to abandon school to support his family, even as they descended into years of poverty. It was an unresolved tension he would carry for decades and pass down to his children. In time, it would come to grip me as well: the dull, wordless feeling that home—indeed, life itself—lay elsewhere.
Though an ancient city of rich heritage, the Chengdu of my childhood was an ode to Soviet-style central planning, built on a series of concentric, ring-shaped roads, serving as a kind of municipal scaffolding extending in every direction toward the countryside. Growth was vertical as well, with buildings of uniform design but ever-rising heights, reaching farther and farther into balmy skies blanketed in near-constant fog and hemmed in by the surrounding basin.
Copyright © 2023 by Fei-Fei Li
