In recent years, Hong Kong has an ambition to become an international technology and innovation center. Although the Hong Kong government has set artificial intelligence (AI) as one of the four major innovation development areas, it has not yet had a complete blueprint for development.
AI is taking hundreds of industries to the next level by empowering transformation. If Hong Kong fails to plan and promote the development of AI promptly, so as to unleash the possibilities of different industries, not only will Hong Kong find it difficult to break through the current economic and social structural conflict, its future development will also fall behind other technologically advanced regions and gradually lose its international leading edge.
In August 2018, the One Country Two Systems Research Institute released a report on "AI Impact on the Job Market in Hong Kong - How to Embrace the Coming AI Era". It pointed out that Hong Kong needs to embrace new opportunities and focus on the development of AI. On this basis, this study deeply analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of Hong Kong's development of AI in terms of policy, industry, technology, and talents, and attempted to build a framework for Hong Kong's AI development blueprint for reference and discussion.
This report first laid the foundation for the discussion of AI development policies by outlining the technical characteristics of AI and its latest development. Followed by collating the AI development strategies of major countries and cities in the world, and comparing them with Hong Kong's innovation policy. We then reckoned (1) the Hong Kong government should alter its role to further adapt and promote the development of AI, and (2) data governance should be improved to ensure safe and reliable data utilization. To be more specific and practical, we explored how Hong Kong's two significant industries - finance industry and healthcare service - can adopt AI to concrete Hong Kong's competitive position in the region. We offered policy suggestions to resolve the causes of the bottleneck and to leverage the AI adoption of both industries, namely, to procure from local technology startups and to establish a Health AI Solution Hub. Finally, other supporting aspects were analyzed, including public funding, commercialization and talent and education.
(Report is written in Chinese language with English executive summary)