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

by Kai-Fu Lee

Finally, the internet-enabled sharing economy will contribute significantly to alleviating job losses and redefining work for the AI age. We’ll see more people step out of traditional careers that are being taken over by algorithms, instead using new platforms that apply the “Uber model” to a variety of services. We see this already in Care.com, an online platform for connecting caregivers and customers, and I believe we will see a blossoming of analogous models in education and other fields. Many mass-market goods and services will be captured by data and optimized by algorithms, but some of the more piecemeal or personalized work within the sharing economy will remain the exclusive domain of humans. In the past, this type of work was constrained by the bureaucratic costs of running a vertical company that attracted customers, dispatched workers, and kept everyone on the payroll even when there wasn’t work to be done. The platformatization of these industries dramatically increases their efficiency, increasing total demand and take-home pay for the service workers themselves. Adding AI to the equation—as ride-hailing companies like Didi and Uber have already done—will only further boost efficiency and attract more workers.