Kai-fu Lee envisions more opportunities in turmoils of change.[Photo provided to China Daily]

In their book, Lee and Wang predict that about 50 percent of the jobs held by humans now - jobs that require "less than five seconds of thinking" - will be replaced by AI in the near future.

The most promising fields where AI will play a greater role, Lee specifies, are auto driving, smart finance, machine translation and computer-aided clinical diagnosis.

Does that mean AI will make more people unemployed?

Lee's answer is: Yes, inevitably.

But he also sees an upcoming change in the types of jobs that people will soon pursue in response to the challenge from AI.

"At least half of the people should find their new positions in a future of man-machine collaboration," they write in the book.

While listing many tasks in which AI programs outperform people, the authors also include a chapter on what AI cannot possibly achieve - logical deduction and abstraction across different fields, imagination, aesthetic evaluation and human emotions, and self-consciousness.