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

by Kai-Fu Lee

Building societies that thrive in the age of AI will require substantial changes to our economy but also a shift in culture and values. Centuries of living within the industrial economy have conditioned many of us to believe that our primary role in society (and even our identity) is found in productive, wage-earning work. Take that away and you have broken one of the strongest bonds between a person and his or her community. As we transition from the industrial age to the AI age, we will need to move away from a mindset that equates work with life or treats humans as variables in a grand productivity optimization algorithm. Instead, we must move toward a new culture that values human love, service, and compassion more than ever before. No economic or social policy can “brute force” a change in our hearts. But in choosing different policies, we can reward different behaviors and start to nudge our culture in different directions. We can choose a purely technocratic approach—one that sees each of us as a set of financial and material needs to be satisfied—and simply transfer enough cash to all people so that they don’t starve or go homeless. In fact, this notion of universal basic income seems to be becoming more and more popular these days. But in making that choice I believe we would both devalue our own humanity and miss out on an unparalleled opportunity. Instead, I want to lay out proposals for how we can use the economic bounty created by AI to double-down on what mak...