Ray Kurzweil thinks we can stay one step ahead of death.

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“How long do you think you will live?” I asked Kurzweil in a recent phone interview.

He rarely misses a beat in conversation, but he was quiet for just a moment before replying. “I think I have a good chance—I would put it at 80 percent—of getting to the point where it becomes indefinite, because you’ll be adding more time than is going by to your remaining life expectancy.”

… He's a variety of believer—not in any god, but in the potential of humans to achieve godlike powers with the aid of the technologies we build.

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So why hasn’t average life expectancy — or even the age of the oldest human alive — budged much over the last few decades? Kurzweil says we’re just approaching what he calls “the knee of the curve.” That’s the point at which an exponential function starts to rocket upward. Longevity, Kurzweil explains, “is going to transform from having been a hit-or-miss affair where progress was linear … to where it is now an information technology and therefore subject to my law of accelerating returns.”

… “I expect to be in good shape when we get to that point,” he told me. “We’ll get to the point where we dramatically extend human life expectancy because we will have wiped out major diseases, and ultimately all disease as well as the aging process.”

For Kurzweil, then, life is a sort of race against the clock. If he and his fellow scientists and software engineers make the right moves, he could live to see the 22^nd century, and then the 23^rd. If not, he will have blown his one shot at immortality.

… All of these companies, as well as national,… you've got to believe, right, that you have in a Defence Department of every nation massive investments going in this way. I mean, if I told you: “Listen, would you rather have a population, which is twice as smart as anybody else, or anything else?” Human intelligence is gonna be the dominating driver in competitiveness in the century ahead.

Last year, China’s government put out its plan to lead the world in AI by 2030.

As Eric Schmidt has explained, “it’s pretty simple. By 2020, they will have caught up. By 2025, they will be better than us. By 2030, they will dominate the industries of AI.”

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4. China’s Government Directive

The day DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat top-ranking Chinese Go player Ke Jie has gone down in history as China’s “Sputnik Moment.”

Within two months of the AI’s victory, China’s government issued its plan to make China the global center of AI innovation, aiming for a 1 trillion RMB (about $150 billion USD) AI industry by 2030.

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Within a year, Chinese VC investors were pouring record sums into AI startups, surpassing the U.S. to make up 48 percent of AI venture funding globally.

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Lastly, local governments have begun to team with China’s leading AI companies to build up party-corporate complexes.

Acting as a “national team,” companies like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and iFlyTek collaborate with national organizations like China’s National Engineering Lab for Deep Learning Technologies to pioneer research and supercharge innovation.

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Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the world as we know it. With US-Sino competition heating up, who will own the future of technology?