An evolutionary view on the emergence of Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper uses evolutionary concepts and patent data to analyze the long-term global and national development patterns of AI, revealing increasing complexity and relatedness, with distinct national trajectories and core technology stability.

Contribution

It introduces an evolutionary framework to study AI emergence using patent indicators, highlighting patterns of relatedness and complexity at global and national levels.

Findings

Global AI relatedness and complexity are increasing.

Core AI technologies show decreasing related variety and rising complexity.

US and Japan increase innovation relatedness; China and South Korea show different trends.

Abstract

This paper draws upon the evolutionary concepts of technological relatedness and knowledge complexity to enhance our understanding of the long-term evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We reveal corresponding patterns in the emergence of AI - globally and in the context of specific geographies of the US, Japan, South Korea, and China. We argue that AI emergence is associated with increasing related variety due to knowledge commonalities as well as increasing complexity. We use patent-based indicators for the period between 1974-2018 to analyse the evolution of AI's global technological space, to identify its technological core as well as changes to its overall relatedness and knowledge complexity. At the national level, we also measure countries' overall specialisations against AI-specific ones. At the global level, we find increasing overall relatedness and complexity of AI. However, for the technological core of AI, which has been stable over time, we find decreasing related variety and increasing complexity. This evidence points out that AI innovations related to core technologies are becoming increasingly distinct from each other. At the country level, we find that the US and Japan have been increasing the overall relatedness of their innovations. The opposite is the case for China and South Korea, which we associate with the fact that these countries are overall less technologically developed than the US and Japan. Finally, we observe a stable increasing overall complexity for all countries apart from China, which we explain by the focus of this country in technologies not strongly linked to AI.