By&nbsp;Joschka FischerBERLIN – In October, the Communist Party of China convened its 20th National Congress, primarily to confirm President Xi Jinping’s hold over the country’s leadership. Everything went according to his plan: the CPC’s top governing body, the Standing Committee, is now staffed only by his most devoted henchmen. With Xi having secured a third term as general secretary – and thus as president – one man now has absolute power in China for the first time since the days of Mao Zedong.Gone is the principle of collective, term-limited leadership that Deng Xiaoping introduced following Mao’s death – a time when China was just beginning its massively successful modernization phase. Yet, as recent history shows, the return to one-man rule in a country of 1.4 billion people represents one of the greatest risks to China and its status as a rising superpower second only to the United States.Yes, under Xi, the Chinese regime’s power has increasingly seemed unlimited and unrestricted, owing to massive investments in state-of-the-art digital mass surveillance and social control systems. Yet the CPC’s strength is not based only on all-encompassing “smart” repression. Rather, it is the result of the party’s tremendous successes in modernizing China.Toward the end of the twentieth century, China integrated itself into the world economy, becoming its “extended workbench” and its number-one exporting country. China then leveraged this growth to develop a highly efficient mixed economy, with a growing private sector operating alongside the traditional party-controlled state sector. The results were phenomenal: China consistently recorded massive annual growth rates, lifting hundreds of millions of people (especially in the coastal regions) out of absolute poverty and into a newly emerging middle class.As China became richer, it increased its military power and pursued more dominant positions on the technological frontier. Within the space of just a few years, its technological successes – born predominantly of the private high-tech sector – made it a serious rival to US Big Tech. For a few years in the late 2010s, it seemed to be only a matter of time before China would replace the US as the world’s largest economy and overwhelmingly dominant technological superpower.Then came the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. Despite some Chinese authorities’ efforts to cover up the emerging epidemic, it soon became the entire world’s problem. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization <a fr-original-style="" href="https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---11-march-2020" style="color: rgb(9, 9, 9); text-decoration: none; background-color: transparent; outline: none; cursor: pointer; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; touch-action: manipulation; user-select: auto; box-sizing: border-box;" target="_blank">declared</a> the outbreak to be a pandemic, and the global economy ground to a halt as countries locked down to contain the spread of the virus.But different countries adopted different strategies over the medium term, depending on their respective cultural and historical traditions. The open, democratic societies of the West, for example, embraced transparency and relied on voluntary self-isolation and the rapid development of effective vaccines. Three years later, their populations are now largely immunized – though many people have died.By contrast, China relied from the beginning on draconian containment measures. Under its zero-COVID policy, every detected infection resulted in forced, closely supervised quarantines for all those affected. For a long time, this strategy seemed superior to the Western approach. China had far fewer deaths, and because it had isolated itself from the rest of the world, its domestic economy also recovered faster than those of the US and Europe. Accordingly, many around the world began to suspect that authoritarian command economies are better equipped for such crises than are the West’s messy, pluralist liberal democracies.But this view has proved to be deeply mistaken. We now know that China’s zero-COVID policy required a suspension of the social contract between the CPC and the people. Xi seems to have overlooked the fact that today’s China – at least the large metropolises that drive the economy – is not the China of the 1960s and 1970s.The new China simply is not suited for policies that require the authorities to shut down entire mega-cities with no notice, often locking workers in factories for weeks at a time. Moreover, owing to China’s position in the world economy, self-isolation was always going to be costly. Not only did zero-COVID create enormous disruptions in international supply chains; it also caused considerable damage to China’s own export sector.Xi wanted to use the pandemic to demonstrate the superiority of the Chinese system over the declining West. Yet this meant that, out of nationalistic arrogance, he refused to import the vastly superior Western mRNA vaccines. With China’s huge population remaining under-vaccinated and unprotected, lifting the zero-COVID measures was bound to be risky.But so, too, were the never-ending lockdowns. Just weeks after the 20th Party Congress, public frustration exploded across China’s large metropolises. Protesters held up sheets of white paper to decry the CPC’s censorship regime, and the “revolt of the blank sheets” spread like a bushfire. Xi had clearly overreached.How could China’s seemingly all-powerful autocrat understand so little about the social contract on which his power rests? For all its difficulties, liberal democracy – with its transparency and self-imposed limits – has once again proved more efficient and resilient than autocracy. Accountability to the people and the rule of law is not a weakness; it is a decisive source of strength. Where Xi sees a cacophony of clashing opinions and subversive free expression, the West sees a flexible and self-correcting form of collective intelligence. The results speak for themselves.<hr fr-original-style="" style="height: 0px; overflow: visible; border-bottom: none; clear: both; user-select: none; break-after: page; box-sizing: border-box;">Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader of the German Green Party for almost 20 years.<hr fr-original-style="" style="height: 0px; overflow: visible; border-bottom: none; clear: both; user-select: none; break-after: page; box-sizing: border-box;">Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022. <a fr-original-style="" href="https://link.apos.to/c/6zN0uALJ7WFN?c=Twpzsz9F83PXH_zkxlyou&sub=62b033905d379200061d8935&s=web" style="color: rgb(9, 9, 9); text-decoration: none; background-color: transparent; outline: none; cursor: pointer; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; touch-action: manipulation; user-select: auto; box-sizing: border-box;" target="_blank">www.project-syndicate.org</a>

Aposto Finance

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, different countries adopted different strategies, depending on their respective cultural and historical traditions. While China's top-down authoritarian strategy initially seemed effective, the regime's zero-COVID policy ultimately proved to be fatally flawed.

COVID and the Chinese Social Contract

AI (artificial intelligence) makes it possible for machines to learn from experience, adapt new inputs, and perform human-like assignments. Most of us know AI from autonomous tool technology and robots that play chess. However, AI has an important position in business besides individual technologies and healthcare services.&nbsp;According to <a fr-original-style="" href="https://hbr.org/2017/04/how-companies-are-already-using-ai?utm_source=aposto&registration=success" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(9, 9, 9); text-decoration: none; background-color: transparent; outline: none; cursor: pointer; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; touch-action: manipulation; user-select: auto; box-sizing: border-box;" target="_blank">Harvard Business Review</a>, companies use AI in these ways:&nbsp;<ul fr-original-style="padding-inline-start: 20px;" style="padding-inline-start: 20px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; list-style-position: inside; box-sizing: border-box;"><li dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Detecting and deterring security intrusions</li><li dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Resolving users’ technology problems</li><li dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Reducing production management&nbsp;</li><li dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Gauging internal compliance in using approved technology vendors</li></ul>Based on IBM’s <a fr-original-style="" href="https://www.ibm.com/watson/resources/ai-adoption" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(9, 9, 9); text-decoration: none; background-color: transparent; outline: none; cursor: pointer; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; touch-action: manipulation; user-select: auto; box-sizing: border-box;" target="_blank">Global AI Adoption Index</a>, almost half of the companies make use of AI to automatise their processes, including improving ‘cost saving and productivity’, ‘information technologies and network performance, and providing customers with better service. Although there are sectoral differences, almost every company that makes global-scale productions incorporates AI to boost their system in different areas and production processes.&nbsp;<h2 dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="margin: 0px; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); font-weight: 500; padding: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">CASE STUDY: Production site</h2><h2 dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="margin: 0px; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); font-weight: 500; padding: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">A Covid story</h2>While China was struggling with Covid-19, China-based <a fr-original-style="" href="https://hbr.org/2022/07/how-to-turn-a-supply-chain-platform-into-an-innovation-engine" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(9, 9, 9); text-decoration: none; background-color: transparent; outline: none; cursor: pointer; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; touch-action: manipulation; user-select: auto; box-sizing: border-box;" target="_blank">Haier Group</a>, one of the biggest white goods manufacturers in the world, partnered up with &nbsp;Heji Home, a China-based home decoration company. To produce mobile isolation units in a hospital in Wuhan, where the virus was first identified. They needed fresh air, sterilisation, and sewage treatment systems to meet the strict medical standards while installing the units. As a result of the collaboration of these two companies for the system that hadn’t been part of their product line of both companies before, a prototype was created.&nbsp;With demands soaring, both companies needed to quickly identify the right partners&nbsp;in a variety of industries, including industrial equipment, healthcare, and construction. They also had to ensure that all interested parties trust each other and be willing to collaborate on the design. Haier and Heji home developed and tested a prototype via Haier’s digital platform COSMOPlat. They also configured their supply chain accordingly and regularised their production capacities in a couple of weeks.&nbsp;Some fundamental differences distinguished COSMOPlat from traditional digital supply chain platforms and other digital platforms. For example, the platform made available different collaborations for innovations, material supply, solving technical problems, and provision of new services, etc. Also, all parties could respond to suggestions and new opportunities or interfere in the system in case of any issues.<h2 dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="margin: 0px; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); font-weight: 500; padding: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">HR processes and productivity</h2>Artificial intelligence provides companies with the opportunity to make more productive use of the workforce and overcome workforce deficiencies by automatising recurrent assignments. &nbsp;30% of global information technology experts claim that employees in their companies save time, thanks to artificial intelligence and automatisation software tools.HR departments of companies use ATS (Applicant Tracking System) in recruitment processes to minimise the risk of hiring a less fitting person and facilitate and simplify the processes. According to <a fr-original-style="" href="https://devskiller.com/applicant-tracking-system/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(9, 9, 9); text-decoration: none; background-color: transparent; outline: none; cursor: pointer; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; touch-action: manipulation; user-select: auto; box-sizing: border-box;" target="_blank">Capterra</a>’s report on the impacts of recruiting software, 75% of recruitment and talent specialists use some type of recruiting or applicant-tracking software.&nbsp;UK-based Unilever has announced that the company has saved 70 thousand hours&nbsp;as a result of its collaboration with the AI-supported recruiting platform Pymetrics, aimed at establishing a platform to assess applicants online during the recruitment process.&nbsp;Another example of accelerated productivity is from Haier. Haier automatises the processes of making offers and contracts with its information technologies platform called ‘EMC Workbench’. Micro-enterprises upload their contracts to the system. Employees in a particular micro-enterprise can see everyone's goals and performance against them, including employees in partner micro-enterprises. This visibility provides micro-enterprises and employees with accountability to reach the objectives in the contract.&nbsp;Another productivity example is from Associated Press&nbsp;(AP), which we all follow. According to Harvard Business Review, AP produced 12 times more stories by training the artificial intelligence software to automatically write about news that doesn’t provide much in return. Thus, journalists gained more freedom and time to cover more in-depth stories. Also, e-commerce giant Alibaba developed a tool called AI-CopyWriter that can produce more than 20 thousand lines per second.<h2 dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="margin: 0px; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.85); font-weight: 500; padding: 0px; box-sizing: border-box;">Obstacles</h2>Companies make diverse use of artificial intelligence. For instance, IBM’s global-scaled work puts out that 35% of companies make use of AI in their operations while 42% explore the technology. Moreover, 30% of IT managers state that they increase productivity in their business processes with employees exploiting AI and automatisation software and tools. Although it is an inevitable fact that this technology provides companies with powerful pros, it also has cons when it comes to adaptability. But why?&nbsp;<ul fr-original-style="padding-inline-start: 20px;" style="padding-inline-start: 20px; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; list-style-position: inside; box-sizing: border-box;"><li dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Limited AI skills</li><li dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Limited expertise or knowledge</li><li dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">High prices of &nbsp;the technology</li><li dir="ltr" fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lack of tools or platforms to develop models</li><li fr-original-style="" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Complexity or difficulty of projects to integrate and scale</li></ul>Also, data trustworthiness&nbsp;is another reason for skepticism toward AI projects. For example, IBM puts forth that although companies have more data than ever, they cite a lack of training for AI applications. To overcome such difficulties such as the holistic view and the complexity of data, metadata, and information architecture, IBM recommends companies focus on corporate culture and adopt a strategic approach to the issue. A corporate culture in which data assets are valuable, defined, mapped, classified and well-managed stands out in this context.There are certain steps companies can take to integrate artificial intelligence into their business processes to minimise challenges and maximise time-saving and use of resources. According to some research carried out by Thomas H. Davenport and his colleagues from Harvard University with more than 250 directors each of who is in charge of a total of 152 projects in their companies, it is vital to have company-wide scaling plans to adopt AI. In addition, a project portfolio based on job requirements is necessary to determine the assignments of each technology. Of course, developing AI in such a way to improve employees’ skills in using digital tools and make sure that employees perceive AI as a technology that will help them work more productively rather than something that will make them lose their jobs can promote the adoption of AI-based projects at all levels of a company.The&nbsp;digitalisation bells ringing even louder with the pandemic, urge companies from almost every sector to acquire digital competencies and use them as advantages for competition, adapt swiftly to the consistently transforming world, and facilitate the adoption of employees. Keeping in mind that the probability of the business world adopting artificial intelligence has increased by 13% in just 1 year, in the following years, we will witness companies taking action about their AI strategies and relevant problem-solving.

Aposto Business

Keeping in mind that the probability of the business world adopting artificial intelligence has increased by 13% in just 1 year, in the following years, we will witness companies taking action about their AI strategies and relevant problem-solving.

Wuhan ile ilgili hikayeler