China has published its first artificial intelligence (AI) textbook for high school students as the country looks to an even younger generation than its huge pool of college graduates to close the gap in the global AI talent war.
The textbook, released in April and named “Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence”, comes around six months after China’s State Council called for the inclusion of AI-related courses in primary and secondary education.
AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines including learning, reasoning and self-correction and is becoming a transformative business force along with robotics and virtual reality. Global business value derived from AI is expected to hit US$3.9 trillion by 2022, according to a forecast by research house Gartner in April this year.
A recent report from the Tencent Research Institute highlighted that the US leads other countries in both the quantity and quality of AI personnel and that China won’t be able to solve its talent shortage in the near term despite prioritising the area in 2017. Demand for AI professionals in China may surge to 5 million in a few years’ time, according to a December 2017 report by the People’s Daily, which cited Zhou Ming, a vice director of education at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.