Data, the New Oil — Surveillance and Advantage

In the twentieth century, the resource that swayed the fate of nations was oil. Countries that held the black liquid gushing up from underground grew rich, and those that lacked it fought over it. So what resource plays the same role in the twenty-first century, the age of AI? It lies not in the earth but in the palms of people’s hands — the vast, invisible flood of “data” that pours ceaselessly from smartphones.

Why “Data Is the New Oil”

As we saw last time, after the shock of AlphaGo in 2016, China placed AI at the core of its national strategy. What underpinned that confidence was a certain conviction: that the strength of AI from now on would be decided not by the inspiration of geniuses alone, but by the vast troves of data used to train it.

Why is data so important? The deep learning we saw in the second episode was a mechanism that grew smarter the more examples it was shown. An AI that has seen only a hundred photos of cats is less accurate than one that has seen a hundred million. In other words, whoever holds more data can build a better AI. Just as more oil could drive more machines, more data can drive more — and smarter — AI. And so a single phrase became a slogan that captured the age.

This metaphor is not perfect, however. Oil disappears when it is burned, but data can be used again and again. It does not diminish when someone uses it. If anything, the more it is gathered, the more its value grows — and this property made the competition over data even fiercer than the one over oil.

The “Oil Field” of a Billion People

So who possessed this new resource in the greatest abundance? The AI researcher Kai-Fu Lee put it memorably in his book AI Superpowers: if data is the new oil, then China is the new Saudi Arabia.

The reason lay in the very structure of Chinese society. First, its overwhelming population. More than a billion people used smartphones, searched, shopped, and moved about — and each of those acts became data. Second, the speed of life’s digitalization. In China, “cashless payment,” paying with just a wave of the smartphone rather than cash, spread at an astonishing pace. From a purchase of a few cents at a street stall to high-value transactions, most of daily life came to be left behind as a digital record.

In this way, China built its AI industry upon a giant “oil field” of data unlike any other in the world.

Between Convenience and Surveillance

But this rich store of data had a shadow side. A society where data gathers in great volume is, turned the other way around, a society where people’s actions are recorded in great volume.

In China, countless cameras placed on street corners, together with facial-recognition technology, captured the flow of people. Systems that let you pay simply by presenting your face spread to many cities as well. In exchange for convenience, who did what, when, and where could be recorded with a precision never seen before — such a society was taking shape. These systems are said to be used not only to improve convenience but also as means of social governance and the maintenance of public order, and international assessments of whether this is right or wrong diverge sharply.

Here we see a fundamental tension that nations face in the age of AI. To make AI strong requires data. But gathering data in great volume can collide with individual privacy and freedom. Convenience, safety, and efficiency on the one hand; individual dignity on the other — how to balance these two has been answered very differently from country to country. An environment where data is easy to collect provides a tailwind for AI development, while the very manner of collecting it became a mirror reflecting a nation’s values.

China of Quantity, America of Quality

So what about America, across the sea? Where China led in the quantity of data, what America held was an advantage of a different kind.

One was the accumulation of algorithms and basic research. Much of the theory and the methods that form the foundation of AI emerged from American universities, research institutes, and giant tech companies. The other was talent. The most brilliant researchers gathered from all over the world, and cutting-edge discoveries piled up one after another. The center of the deep-learning revolution we saw in the second episode, too, was the United States.

In this way, the U.S. and China came to face each other on the new battleground of AI supremacy, each holding a different resource and a different strength. The location of data, the new oil, had begun to redraw the map of power.

Yet here is one fact we cannot afford to overlook. However abundant the data one holds, nothing can begin without the “device” that processes it and runs the AI. The computing heart that turns vast data into learning — it was running on a tiny semiconductor born from sand. Next time: the story of another contest for supremacy, this one over the very heart of AI.