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

by Kai-Fu Lee

Lifelong learning via online platforms is a nice idea, and I believe retraining workers will be an important piece of the puzzle. It can particularly help those individuals within the bottom-right quadrant of our risk-of-replacement charts from chapter 6 (the “Slow Creep” zone) stay ahead of AI’s ability to think creatively or work in unstructured environments. I also like that this method can give these workers a sense of personal accomplishment and agency in their own lives. But given the depth and breadth of AI’s impact on jobs, I fear this approach will be far from enough to solve the problem. As AI steadily conquers new professions, workers will be forced to change occupations every few years, rapidly trying to acquire skills that it took others an entire lifetime to build up. Uncertainty over the pace and path of automation makes things even more difficult. Even AI experts have difficulty predicting exactly which jobs will be subject to automation in the coming years. Can we really expect a typical worker choosing a retraining program to accurately predict which jobs will be safe a few years from now? I fear workers will find themselves in a state of constant retreat, like animals fleeing relentlessly rising flood waters, anxiously hopping from one rock to another in search of higher ground. Retraining will help many people find their place in the AI economy, and we must experiment with ways to scale this up and make it widely available. But I believe we cannot count...