ACCEPT's Director David Daokui Li Speaks at the Boao Forum for Asia

Originally published in Chinese on April 21, 2021 by ACCEPT. Translated by ACCEPT.

Source: http://www.accept.tsinghua.edu.cn/2021/0421/c25a861/page.htm

On the evening of April 20, 2021, ACCEPT’s Director David Daokui Li shared three main observations at the “Opportunities and Challenges for the Digital Economy” session of the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2021.

First, David Li believes it is clear that the consumer-oriented digital economy will show great development in the future. For example, JD.com’s logistics and delivery will become even more convenient, and demand matching will be more accurate and in line with consumer habits. At the same time, there will also be self-driving vehicles and smart medicine—we will even be able to receive a diagnosis online. These are all things worth looking forward to.

The second observation regards the industrial internet. David Li said that people spend most of their daily lives inside a building, thereby producing a great deal of data, and this data is very important for the improvement of our lives. From now on, existing and future buildings should be redesigned and transformed to better integrate production and consumption links.

“The third aspect may be a bit more distant from us,” David Li said. “For consumption and for the industrial internet to have a place to land, we need to invest heavily in infrastructure.”

For example, David Li shared that the greatest issue with self-driving vehicles is not a problem with the cars themselves, but with the road they drive on. Future roads will need many more sensors and signals to ensure the safety and improvement of autonomous driving.

“There are so many opportunities in these three areas that I personally think the target of 60 trillion RMB of output from the digital economy may be too small,” David Li said. “This figure should perhaps be calculated in terms of GDP—more than 50% of GDP (by 2025) will be within the digital economy.”