AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee

AI-driven automation in factories will undercut the one economic advantage developing countries historically possessed: cheap labor. Robot-operated factories will likely relocate to be closer to their customers in large markets, pulling away the ladder that developing countries like China and the “Asian Tigers” of South Korea and Singapore climbed up on their way to becoming high-income, technology-driven economies. The gap between the global haves and have-nots will widen, with no known path toward closing it. The AI world order will combine winner-take-all economics with an unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a few companies in China and the United States. This, I believe, is the real underlying threat posed by artificial intelligence: tremendous social disorder and political collapse stemming from widespread unemployment and gaping inequality.