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

by Kai-Fu Lee

THE THREE R’S: REDUCE, RETRAIN, AND REDISTRIBUTE Many of the proposed technical solutions for AI-induced job losses coming out of Silicon Valley fall into three buckets: retraining workers, reducing work hours, or redistributing income. Each of these approaches aims to augment a different variable within the labor markets (skills, time, compensation) and also embodies different assumption about the speed and severity of job losses. Those advocating the retraining of workers tend to believe that AI will slowly shift what skills are in demand, but if workers can adapt their abilities and training, then there will be no decrease in the need for labor. Those advocates of reducing work hours believe that AI will reduce the demand for human labor and feel that this impact could be absorbed by moving to a three- or four-day work week, spreading the jobs that do remain over more workers. The redistribution camp tends to be the most dire in their predictions of AI-induced job losses. Many of them predict that as AI advances, it will so thoroughly displace or dislodge workers that no amount of training or tweaking hours will be sufficient. Instead, we will have to adopt more radical redistribution schemes to support unemployed workers and spread the wealth created by AI.