Dual engines for AI-driven high-quality growth

Editor's note: ThePaper.cn spoke to Hu Yanping, a professor at the Digital Frontier Research Institute in Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, on the role of AI in developing the smart economy. Below are excerpts of the interview. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

The development of the smart economy consists of two super cycles involving AI-centered technological industries and AI-driven new industries. AI provides the foundational capabilities for emerging industries while their expansion, in turn, accelerates technological breakthroughs. Their coordination can form a flywheel effect to drive economic growth.

AI for industry should not be understood simply as a tool to enhance existing research methods. It represents a deeper shift in scientific paradigms. This transformation has the potential to significantly accelerate discovery and enable breakthroughs in critical fields such as drug development, advanced materials, energy and climate science. This would set off a chain reaction in which new capabilities drive scientific innovation, which then leads to industrial innovation.

China is currently experiencing the overlap of these two super cycles. The growth of AI-driven emerging industries is likely to generate new jobs and economic forms, helping offset the risks introduced by AI-centered technological industries. Meanwhile, leveraging the advances in the cycle of AI technological industries for the growth of future industry clusters can broaden participation.

If the flywheel effect takes hold, it could move the economy beyond its current trajectory and onto a new development path. Emerging and future industries are set to form large and complex industrial ecosystems whose contributions to innovation, employment and competition may surpass those of earlier communication industries.

However, technology and markets alone cannot help the smart economy complete the social feedback loop and AI technology cannot ensure its sustainable development. The key questions are not whether to develop AI, but how to develop it, for whom and who owns it. While AI can generate growth, institutions must be capable of managing the accompanying risks and ensuring that the gains are broadly shared. On the one hand, economic growth will be driven by AI. On the other hand, society needs to handle the risks of AI development.

As such, it requires a clear understanding of economic circulation in the smart economy. Policymakers need to anticipate shifts in income distribution and employment structures and introduce suitable market adjustments. Social welfare systems should also evolve in advance. For example, technology-enabled solutions can be part of social security to ease transitional frictions and unlock broader innovative potential.

The popularity of OpenClaw reflects the collision of two powerful forces. One is the "AI wave", which means that the capability of AI, particularly autonomous agents, has reached a level that can handle tasks once performed by humans.

The other is people's anxiety about AI, a strong desire to learn and master it and a widespread push to enhance individual capabilities through its use. Together, these forces have driven one of the fastest adoption cycles for AI products to date.

The market for products such as OpenClaw has become an important battlefield for major tech companies. This is both an opportunity to expand and a moment of self-disruption for internet firms, because open and distributed AI systems are fundamentally at odds with the traditional "walled garden" model of the internet.

For individuals, however, this marks the emergence of truly personal AI systems that are built around each user, connecting capabilities, data and use cases into a unified whole.